


Hearts Beat Time Out

by Mosca



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Champions On Ice, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mile High Club, Power Bottoming, Tour Bus Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 15:11:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 41,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2114601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two artist-athletes, too talented to be normal but not too gay to function, have sex, fall in love, recover from injuries both physical and emotional, make unsustainable promises, spend their endorsement checks on noodles and fashion, go on tour, deal with being almost famous, and learn a thing or two about women, not necessarily in that order. There might also be some skating.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Qualifying Round. Compulsory Dance.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Sandyk and Anna for IM audiencing; Distraction for assistance and sitting through Champions on Ice; Dagnylilytable for help with Russian words and accents; and Sandyk and Templemarker for beta reading.
> 
> I originally posted this to my Livejournal in July 2006. The story begins at the 2006 World Figure Skating Championships and is slightly AU from reality after that.
> 
> The title is from "Shine a Light" by Wolf Parade.
> 
> "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."  
> \-- T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Occasionally, in interviews, Ben had been asked about the worst part of being a world-class skater. He was in the habit of lying, because there was no point in telling his fans that there were few things more annoying than opening-night receptions at international skating competitions. This one was being held in a building adjacent to the ice arena where Worlds would start the next day, and the room was freezing. As usual, the organizers had confused figure skaters with penguins. Since half the skaters were underage, and all of them were supposed to be behaving themselves, the food was bland and Tanith was having trouble getting her hands on a Diet Coke. And because everyone's coaches were there, not to mention the entire ISU board, everyone actually _was_ behaving themselves. Even Elena Sokolova looked like she'd been sober for at least six hours.

Ben put his head down on the table, wishing he hadn't let Tanith talk him out of bringing his iPod.

Despite the noise, Ben had almost dozed off when someone started shaking his shoulder. "Is Dick Button slipping people roofies again?"

Ben yawned and turned around. Someone had sent Johnny over to harass him. He put his head back down.

Johnny grabbed a chair and sat down backwards in it. "Seriously. People are asking Tanith if you're pregnant."

"I'm all right," Ben said, forcing a smile. "I just need a minute."

"You and everyone else," Johnny said. That explained it: he wanted an excuse to complain about his own troubles. Not that Ben had any right to expect sympathy from a bunch of high-strung divas the night before a major competition, but he'd been hopeful for a moment. As expected, Johnny launched into his own self-pity. "And FYI, if you're thinking of dumping someone? Don't send them an e-mail the day before quals." 

Johnny's boyfriend was known in the skating community as The Shadow. They'd been together for two years, but no one had ever met the guy. Apparently, that was how Johnny's publicist liked things. "I'm sorry," Ben said, because he couldn't think of any better consolation for losing an invisible boyfriend.

"You'd think after two years, he would have figured out my schedule," Johnny said.

"Oh, he did," Ben said. "Thank you, goodbye, hope you lose."

Johnny studied him. Cautiously, he put a hand on Ben's shoulder. Ben made a point of not shying away. "Merrie?" Johnny said.

"Finally figured out I was never going to love her more than skating," Ben said.

Johnny looked around the room in a slow sweep. "People who've just been dumped shouldn't be required to go to these things," he said. "Wanna leave?"

"Nobody leaves," Ben said. "If you try to escape, they let loose the hounds."

"Not a problem," Johnny said. "Stole Dick's roofies. Fed them to the hounds."

Ben sighed. "I shouldn't." 

"What? We made our appearances. I've got back spasms so bad I shouldn't even be standing up, and you've . . . got a groin injury that's been bothering you."

"Oh, that's so played out," Ben said. But he smiled. "Sprained my wrist."

"Threw out your shoulder?"

"Unspecified knee issues."

"I like it," Johnny said. "It's both original and vague."

"I'll tell Tanith," Ben said, getting up.

"Christ, are you married?" Johnny said.

"No sex," Ben said. He went over to where Tanith was being really polite to Albena Denkova. Tanith rolled her eyes and punched his arm, but that meant she understood. She tended to. 

Johnny had worked out a way to sneak out of the back of the building. The door said that it would set off a fire alarm, but nothing happened. "It's not my first trip to Calgary," Johnny said with a grin. "Let's go somewhere. I think I want Chinese food. Or a Cosmo. No, not in Canada. Chinese food. Come on."

Ben was trapped in downtown Calgary with a crazy person, but the only alternative was going back to the reception, and it was pretty easy to bribe him with sesame noodles. There was a free train that ran across the center of town, and Johnny knew where to catch it. Johnny spun around on one of the poles that ran through the train car. As Johnny sat back down, Ben thought he saw Johnny wince, although he covered it up by smiling the way he smiled at the press when he knew he'd said something he was going to get in trouble for. "Sorry," he said. "Can't resist. Too much of a diva."

Ben saw a Chinese restaurant from the window of the train, and they got off at the next stop. By the time they were on foot, that restaurant had ceased to exist, but they found another one. It was pretty much empty. There was a girl sitting in the corner, maybe twelve years old, doing her homework, and she was trying not to stare at them like she knew who they were. "I should have brought sunglasses," Johnny said.

"I think the sunglasses make it worse," Ben said. "They're like, look at me, I'm wearing sunglasses in Calgary in March. This way, she just thinks you're some guy who looks like Johnny Weir."

"Yeah, well," Johnny said. "If she doesn't come over here, I'm signing a napkin."

"I'm signing it 'Michelle Kwan,'" Ben said.

"Surprise! The groin injury was a sex change! Love, Michelle Kwan." Johnny giggled loudly, and the girl looked over at them. Ben shrugged at her. She ran back into the kitchen, and someone rushed out to take their order. 

"Oh, Michelle is _nice_ ," Ben said after the waitress had gone away.

"She _is_? To who?" Johnny said. He swished his water in his glass like he wished it were vodka. "There's going to be a _huge_ diva shortage, though, with her and Ira gone."

"Irina?" Ben had heard rumors that her health was going south again, but nothing for certain. 

"Shit," Johnny said. "Forget I said anything."

If Tanith had been there, she would have pushed for an explanation. She got a kick out of the gossip. She liked making fun of it later. But after five years of knowing that everyone was talking behind their backs about how they ought to just get married if she wanted citizenship so bad, Ben was sick of it. "Already forgotten," he said.

Johnny leaned forward on his elbows. "You know what? I actually believe you." The table was big enough that there was still a good foot between his face and Ben's, but it felt a little close, a little intrusive. Ben realized that this might be a date, and he wished someone had warned him beforehand. But he didn't think Johnny had planned it that way, either. 

He tried to think of what he would do if Johnny made a move. He couldn't decide if it was worse to act immature and disgusted, or to pretend to let him down easy. It would seem fake either way -- maybe not to Johnny, but definitely to himself. And the fakeness was what they were trying to escape, wasn't it? They'd have enough time to perform once the competition started.

Just go with it, he decided. If Johnny made a move, he'd go with it. Kiss him, laugh, mention that he was still straight. Nothing was going to happen, anyway. Johnny was a drama queen, but he wasn't an asshole.

*

Ben would have gotten totally lost in Calgary if it hadn't been for Johnny. For a straight guy, he had an embarrassingly crappy sense of direction. Johnny was proud of himself for getting them both back to the skaters' lodge. People always seemed to think that he was incompetent at everything but skating. It scared people that he had actual life skills and could exist in the real world without, like, flouncing around and getting arrested. It made people question whether being normal was worth the effort.

He and Ben had rooms on the same floor. "You have your own room, right?" Johnny said in the elevator.

"No, new ISU policy, pairs and dance teams have to share a bed," Ben said. He waited a moment, looking serious, before he cracked up. Johnny was laughing, too, but self-consciously. Ben wasn't lame-funny, reception-funny; he was real-funny, things-you-don't-say-at-press-conferences funny. And when he laughed, he smiled, and when he smiled, he was cute, and when he was cute, Johnny was really, really close to melting into a puddle at his feet. One of the only straight American figure skaters in senior international competition, and that was who Johnny had to be getting a crush on. Fate could at least have had the generosity to make him fall in love with one of the Russians.

Ben walked him back to his room. Johnny told himself that there was nothing weird about that. It was a little too much, somehow, a little too nice. It was meaner to be nice if you weren't interested. But Ben had always kept his distance in the past. Johnny had been the one to make him go out, to pretend they were friends when they weren't. 

They got to Johnny's room, and Johnny unlocked the door. Ben was still standing there. "Um, good night?" Johnny said, trying not to sound too bitchy. He cleared his throat. "Or. Um. You could come in. If it's -- I mean, it's still early."

"Okay," Ben said, as if that cleared up anything. He was standing in the doorway, blocking it. He looked like he was expecting to be kissed good night. Not exactly wanting it, but assuming that Johnny would make the stupid move. 

Johnny thought, well, if it was what he was _expecting_.

It was only supposed to be a compliment. Johnny would lean in, Ben would take a step back and laugh, and the sexual tension would go away so they could be friends. Johnny had come to Calgary assuming that he was going to be spending his nights alone with his iPod. That was better for his skating, anyway. Priscilla would never get tired of yelling at him for getting drunk and laid when he was supposed to be resting. 

On the other hand, tomorrow was just quals, and Johnny didn't have to skate until 11 in the morning. He could skip morning practice if he had to. It wouldn't be the first time. A couple of times, his publicist had asked him to get breakfast on his own when the other skaters were running through their programs, to avoid saying something regrettable before he'd had his coffee. And anyway, he knew better than to start making evening plans based on one kiss from a straight guy.

Johnny curved his lips into a coy smile and cocked his head to the side. Ben stood his ground. He had soft lips -- Blistex soft, not complex-grooming-regimen soft. And when Johnny tried to pull away, to explain that this had all been fun but he knew better than to let straight guys lead him on, Ben drew him forward by the hips and opened his mouth, kissed him harder and deeper. It was very Tolstoy of him, Johnny thought, and laughing at his own joke made it too hard to kiss.

"Shit," Ben said.

"Sorry," Johnny said.

"No, I - we've got a practice slot at, like, seven."

"Me too. What a coincidence."

"No - What I mean is -"

"No," Johnny said. "Don't apologize. Don't make excuses. I get it. Just stop talking and go."

"I don't think I want to," Ben said.

Johnny pulled him into the room and kicked the door closed behind them. Ben kissed him again, and they made out in the doorway for a while. Johnny tugged Ben's hair out of its ponytail and ran his fingers through it. He'd been wanting to do that ever since Ben had started growing it out. People had gossiped about it when Ben had first shown up to competition with hair long enough to tie back, like it was the end of civilization. It made the fans think he wasn't serious about the sport, people said. Like fans cared that much about hair. But it did matter. It was sexy. 

Ben put his hands on Johnny's ass, and for a second, Johnny thought Ben was going to lift him. Instead, it was like they were glued to the doorway. Johnny sidestepped towards the bed, and Ben moved with him flawlessly. One of the first things that Johnny had learned to do in pairs was follow: girls had shorter gaits, and you had to time your spins and throws to them. It seemed like Ben was used to that, to making it look like he was leading. 

They knelt facing each other on the bed, still kissing. Johnny didn't know where to take it from there. Usually, sex was like skating: he could take himself out of his head and let his body take over. But he was used to being with guys who were more experienced than he was. He was used to being with Alex - two years since he'd been with anyone else. It was easier to be agreeable and do what the other guy wanted. 

But it was obvious by now that Ben didn't have the first clue to what he wanted. Johnny was mostly afraid of scaring him away. Stick a finger in the straight boy's ass, send him running right back to heterosexuality. Johnny thought about going down on him, but he worried that Ben would want to reciprocate, and a bad blow job was sometimes worse than no blow job at all. He wished he had a choreographer.

Ben ran his hands up Johnny's sides and eased him out of his shirt. While Johnny's hands were still over his head, Ben pushed him onto his back. Johnny winced as his spasms returned. He grabbed Ben by the hair and said, "Not gonna work."

"I didn't know," Ben said.

"If I weren't skating tomorrow, then maybe," Johnny said. "But I'd have to put my legs way up over my head, and -" He couldn't get himself to admit how much pain he was in. If Ben found that out, there was no way Johnny was getting laid.

"And you'd have your back all stretched the wrong way, and it would fuck up your spiral sequence," Ben said.

"There have been nights when I've actually had to make the choice between sex and Biellmann spins."

"So you can't -"

"Just not on my back," Johnny said. He cupped Ben's face in his hand. "And who said I was bottoming, anyway?"

Way to send the nervous straight boy out of the room. Ben blinked at him.

"It's not that you were wrong," Johnny said. "I just, I hate when people assume, you know?"

"I know," Ben said. "No. Look at me. I'm serious. I _know_."

He was right, and Johnny almost said something about how rare and lucky that was. But it made him anxious, too. It was unsafe enough to have an unplanned one-night stand with another skater. Liking him, trusting him, was a PR nightmare too ominous to contemplate.

"I brought condoms," Johnny said, "but I didn't unpack them. Just a sec." He hopped down off the bed, hand on the small of his back, to dig them out.

"You carry condoms in your gym bag?" Ben laughed.

"I used to keep them in the Louis Vuitton, but it seemed kind of vulgar," Johnny said.

It took a minute to find the condoms; they were in with the athletic tape and a couple of Power Bars. When he turned around, Ben was naked, sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting. He had a perfect skater's body, ripped through his arms and his pecs, strong legs, ugly feet. Also, a shy smile and an erection. Johnny skipped back to the bed and took his pants off. "So," Ben said. "Where do you want me?"

Johnny lay down on his stomach, rested his cheek on his hand, and kicked a foot in the air. He expected Ben to take it as a joke, as another excuse to hesitate. But Ben climbed on top of him, almost holding him down, and started kissing his neck. It was a little too something - delicate or foreplayish or whatever - but it was sweet, and Johnny let it happen. Ben ran his hand down Johnny's chest, making him rock back onto his knees to create a little space between his belly and the bed. Ben's fingers were certain and curious, traveling down Johnny's stomach to his cock. Like he needed to know it was there, needed to know what it felt like. Johnny bit his lip and tried not to jerk too hard into Ben's hand. "Oh, you're - okay," Ben said. And there was some adjustment, Johnny's hips up and Ben's forward, and the rip of a condom wrapper, and Ben being way too careful at first but getting into it. It wasn't the most skillful fuck in the ass that Johnny had ever had, but it was warm and well-meant, and it was comforting to have a man's arms around him. If what he'd wanted was the orgasm, he could've gone to bed alone. He got one, though, a slow and satisfying one, and he had to fight to hold himself up on his elbows while Ben finished. 

He let Ben lie on top of him for a minute, heavy and exhausted. He could feel Ben smiling into his back. "I should get some sleep," Ben said.

"You can stay here," Johnny said. "I can set my alarm for five." He reached over to the nightstand and grabbed his little travel clock. "You'll make people think I'm actually responsible."

"Or that you've learned how to catch a bus in time for your practice slot," Ben teased.

Johnny stuck out his tongue. "You know, I _did_ actually miss that bus."

"You could have lied," Ben said. "You would have saved yourself some embarrassment."

"What should I have said? That I had the flu?"

"Hey," Ben said. "Evan really _had_ the flu."

"He also really had Marcello, one of the dancers from the Opening Ceremonies, every night from the OC dress rehearsals until he left Torino," Johnny said. 

Ben chuckled like this information was not completely new to him, but there were details he had not been aware of. He could convey that much in a facial expression. It gave Johnny a melty feeling.

"I guess we all decide what part of the truth to tell," Johnny said, hoping he could get across just as much in the tone of his voice and the percussive motion with which he turned out the light.

*

Ben's morning began, like many of his mornings, while it was still dark outside, with a relentless beeping. It was not, however, the familiar relentless beeping: this was slower and higher-pitched. Also, he was naked, and someone was throwing the covers off of him and muttering, "Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck" while diving in the direction of the beep. Ben stretched and sat up. He'd forgotten to take his contacts out, and his eyes felt numb.

"Oh, you're still -- I forgot," Johnny said. "I fucking forgot. I mean, I didn't _forget_. But I - never mind. I'll turn on a light so you can find your stuff."

There were a pen and a pad of paper on the nightstand, and Ben reached for it. He covered it with his hand when Johnny tried to read it. He wrote, "Thanks for the groin injury. Love, Michelle." He even dotted the "i" with a heart. He folded it up and put it in the front pocket of Johnny's gym bag. "Don't read it now," he said. Johnny looked disappointed, so he gave him a kiss before putting his clothes on and leaving.

As he shut the door, he realized he should have checked to make sure the coast was clear. But he'd already locked it behind him, and he was going to miss the shuttle to the rink if he went back to Johnny's room to hide. He was in yesterday's clothes, carrying his shoes, and Zhang Dan was standing in the hallway, talking on her cell phone. Staring at him. He smiled and waved, then widened his eyes and put his finger to his lips. She smiled back and mirrored his gesture. Either she'd gotten the message, or she thought she was being too loud on the phone. 

Ben got himself showered, shaved, and dressed, repacked his gym bag, and took the stairs down to the hospitality room. Tanith intercepted him at the door and shoved a cup of orange juice into his hand. "Jesus H. Christ," she said. "Where did you go? Were you out all night?"

"We just got dinner and came back to the complex," Ben said.

"You look like hell," she said.

"Thank you."

"You really just got dinner and came home?" she said.

"Yep."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "You got laid, didn't you?"

He choked on his juice.

She patted his arm. "I'm so jealous," she said. "I mean, you got _dinner_. Meanwhile, I was stuck listening to Carolina Kostner talk about her hair for an hour. Seriously. _Over_ an hour."

"She's right behind you," Ben said.

Tanith turned crimson and whipped her head around.

"Kidding," Ben said.

"Bastard," she said, but she was laughing. "So. Did you catch her name?"

"Whose?"

"The girl you slept with last night."

"There's no girl," Ben said.

"Shut _up_." 

"There's no girl," Ben said. "There's no - I mean it. We'll talk about it later."

Tanith started to protest, but an ISU official announced that the shuttle was leaving in five minutes, and they had to run before they were trampled by dance teams. She tried to bring it up again a couple of times on the way, but he stood his ground. It wasn't that he wanted to keep secrets from her. But every skater and coach on that shuttle bus had their iPods turned down just low enough that they were sure to hear any gossip that might float their way. Most of them didn't even know that he and Merrie had broken up yet. He had to hang onto that lie for a few more days. Just until the end of Worlds. It was so much easier when people thought that he and Tanith weren't all that interesting.

They tried to practice their compulsory dance, but they were completely off step. "You're too aggressive," Igor kept yelling at Tanith. "You're rushing." He didn't ride Ben too hard for being asleep on his feet, but Igor didn't yell things that were obvious to everyone. Finally, in exasperation, Igor made them take five minutes. 

Tanith dragged Ben into an empty locker room. "It's later," she said.

"I slept with Johnny," Ben said. He sorely wished he could have messed with her a little longer, but they only had five minutes. 

"Yeah," she said. "I kind of figured that out." She waited for him to say something, and when he didn't, she asked, "So. Are you . . ."

"I don't know," he said. "It just, it sort of, it happened."

"Okay," she said. "Okay, but - but you couldn't have waited? I mean, Merrie."

"I think this is how I'm getting over it," Ben said. "I mean, if there's a way it happened, that's kind of . . . it."

"So The Shadow?"

"Has blown away," Ben said. "Sent him a fucking e-mail."

"Tacky," she said. There were footsteps in the hallway, and she looked over her shoulder. "We should skate," she said.

They weren't miraculously back in sync, but it was better. "That's it," Igor shouted. "Smile like you're in love." Ben wanted to shout back that it was a little soon for that.

The organizers shooed everyone off the ice fast at the end of the practice session, and Ben waited out the mob scene before he went to take off his skates and change. When he reached into his gym bag, he found a slip of paper that he hadn't left there. He took it out and unfolded it. "Anytime, sweetheart," it said. "Love, Tinkerbelle."

*

By noon, Johnny had skated his long program and qualified for the next round of Worlds. By two in the afternoon, he was bored. Also sleepy, and his hair needed washing. He'd parked himself in one of the armchairs in the hospitality lounge until the maid service finished on his floor. He'd almost dozed off to the club remix of "Since U Been Gone" when his cell phone went off. He mumbled a hello without checking to see who was calling. "Were you sleeping?" a Russian-accented voice teased.

"I'm not sleeping," Johnny said. "I'm recharging my fabulousness." He wasn't sure if Ira would even understand that, but some things, he said purely to amuse himself.

"Come on. Get up. They don't have coffee in hospitality room?"

"We're in Canada. There's no coffee after noon in Canada."

"You're in Calgary," she said. "Calgary has Starbucks."

"I don't need coffee," Johnny said, stretching. "I'm done for the day."

"Lucky duck," she said. She'd woken him up enough to make him realize that this had nothing to do with coffee. She needed him to know what was going on with her. When she'd won bronze at the Olympics, she'd hurled the medal into a locker, and she'd been muttering about retirement during exhibitions. But when he'd called to ask if she was serious, she hadn't answered her phone.

"So," she said. "I hear you are breaking up with Alex. He could at least wait until after Worlds, don't you think?"

"I think he did it on purpose," Johnny said. "One last attempt to out-diva me."

"But you are okay?" she said.

"Terrific," Johnny said. He was about to force an ironic smile, but he remembered that she couldn't see him. He wasn't terrific, but he was all right. The relationship had been dying slowly. He knew that he was supposed to be depressed, but he felt light. Like it was suddenly easy to get off the ground. Ben had something to do with that, maybe, but he'd been feeling it before. He'd heard people say that it just wasn't a good time for them to be in a relationship, and he'd always thought it was a ploy to disguise bitterness at being alone. But now that Alex was gone, he wasn't responsible for anybody else's happiness. He could worry about his own.

"Your skating, it is okay?" she said.

"I'm having trouble with my back," he said. "I doubled a couple of jumps."

He could hear her shrugging. "Is only quals," she said. 

"That's what I'm going to keep telling myself," he said.

She paused for so long that he checked his phone to make sure he hadn't lost the signal. "What you are not telling me?" she said. "There is somebody else?"

"No," he said. "No. I mean, there wasn't anybody before."

She laughed. "You are leaving opening night reception early to pick up boys?"

"Not on _purpose_."

"You just accidentally fall onto his _khuy_?"

"It happens sometimes," he said.

"This does not _happen_ ," she said. "But okay. Is he skater or civilian?"

"Ice dancer," Johnny admitted. 

"Pfft, they are the worst," she said. "Okay. Promise me this thing. You will not fall in love with him."

"It was a one-night stand. _Na khuya_?" That whole night was stuck in his head like a song. He wished he could hum it to Ira and have her understand it.

"Promise me."

"All right," he said hollowly. "I promise."

"You promise what?"

"I promise I won't fall in love with this person, who I'm never going to bed with again, because he's straight, so it doesn't matter."

"Vanya," she said. "If he is going to bed with you, he is not straight."

"Don't say that," he said. "You're making it all complicated."

"Is not complicated," she said. "Is very simple. You do not see him again, you take time for heart to heal up, you meet someone who is not ice dancer. And then you're happy."

"And then I'll go pro, and I'll come out to the press, and there will be bunnies and flowers and rainbows . . ."

"All of this will happen," Ira said. 

"Maybe not the bunnies," Johnny said.

"Oh, for certainly you will have the bunnies."

"Too bad they're the one thing I don't want," he said, and he had her laughing, which is what he'd wanted. Every time he'd seen her lately, he'd seen pain in her eyes. She'd limped off the ice after her Olympic long program; he'd caught her crying softly during the rehearsals for exhibitions. He'd been surprised when she'd let him hug her and tease her until she giggled. A year earlier, during the Champions on Ice tour, she'd told him that she'd watch out for him, that they had to stick together. He hadn't quite believed her, and he certainly hadn't believed that it worked both ways. But she seemed to have picked up on the fact that they both held a lot in, that they smiled extra pretty for the camera so it worked like a mask. 

When she stopped laughing, he asked, "How are you doing? Are you okay?"

"Not so good," she said. "But in a few weeks, I will be skating, and then everything is okay again." She didn't have to add anything. It was true for her.

"And your mom?"

"Not so okay," she said. "But she is still here. So could be worse."

"You would tell me, right? You would -"

"Of course I would tell," Ira said. "That is deal, right?"

"Right."

"So why you are not telling me which ice dancer you have sex with last night?" 

"The deal is between you and me," Johnny said. "He's not in on it. And he's a good person. Like, actually a good person."

"You said he is ice dancer, right? Russian ice dancer."

"I never said he was Russian."

"All right. If he is not Russian, I will believe you," she said. "So long as you do not fall in love."

"I promised, didn't I?" Johnny said.

*

"Got any plans for tonight?" Tanith said on the way back to the hotel from their afternoon practice. She didn't actually nudge him and wink, but she might as well have.

"I was going to finish that book," Ben said. "Maybe get in an hour on the Stairmaster."

"Is that what we're calling him in public?"

"Would you keep it down?"

"What? Nobody else on this bus speaks English. And 'Stairmaster' is a really good code word."

"What part of one night stand do you not understand?" he whispered.

"The part where you broke up with your girlfriend all of a week ago and you're walking on fucking sunshine?" she said. 

"I'm not - I am _not_ ," he said. "Also, you're very loud."

She started singing. 

"You know, I'd kill you, but we skate so damn well together."

"It's too bad," she said.

"That I can't kill you?"

"That it was just the one night," she said. She didn't pause to register his shock. "You're more fun when you're happy. And I like the Stairmaster, and I think - I think people I like should be with people I like."

"I'm not 'with' . . . this person." Ben hadn't considered that possibility, not really. He'd left a note, he'd left the room, he'd assumed that was the end of it. The only reason he was giving this a second thought was because he wasn't used to being single. He'd get over it and meet someone else, a girl, someone who made sense. But he couldn't help but feel like he wasn't finished. He hadn't done the best he could do. When he'd been a little kid, he'd thrown fits at his mom and his coach when they tried to explain to him that you couldn't have a do-over in a competition. Real life was more generous than skating.

They were the last ones off the bus. It wasn't like they had anywhere else to be. The exercise room back at the lodge wouldn't be crowded: there was a facility with better equipment at the skating complex, and most people were using that. But Ben wanted quiet, the privacy of an empty room where he could have an easy workout and read a little space opera. He went up to his room to get his gym shoes and his book. When he got back down to the exercise room, Johnny was there, leaning back against the door. "Tanith told me I should meet you here," Johnny said. "She said you wanted to talk to me."

"Tanith gets some crazy ideas in her head," Ben said. He didn't mean for it to sound harsh, but it did.

"I'm sorry," Johnny said. "I mean, it seemed like you were okay with it when you left this morning. I wouldn't have, you know, if I thought you were -"

"I _am_ okay," Ben said. "It was good. It was fun. But Tanith's, like, picking out our curtains and I'm . . ."

"Not?"

"I mean, I - you're a - I _like_ you, but -"

"Not," Johnny said.

"Really not."

"Thank God," Johnny said. "I was having these nightmare fantasies that you were going to chase me all over Canada or something."

" _Really_ not," Ben said, too harsh again. 

Johnny made a pouty face, but he couldn't sustain it, and he burst into giggles. That took class, Ben thought, to laugh at being turned down and mean it. Clearly, there were all kinds of things going on in Johnny's head that he wouldn't let Ben touch. If Ben turned him down now, he'd never see any more of it. The walls would go up forever, just when Ben was starting to like him. He wouldn't get to change his mind later, and he'd have thousands of chances to regret that. So he said, "I mean, we _could_. If you wanted. Just sex, no curtains."

Johnny looked away from him. "Don't."

"What?"

"Be a fucking cocktease," Johnny said.

Ben had known this was going wrong, but he hadn't realized it was going that kind of wrong. He was working so hard not to lead Johnny on, not to hurt his feelings. The harder he worked, the worse he sounded. He needed to stop thinking, and he couldn't stop. "I wasn't trying to be," he said.

"It's always easier when you aren't trying," Johnny said. He'd been keeping some distance between himself and Ben, but it only took him one step to close it. He put his hands on Ben's hips and pressed his forehead against Ben's. "Just sex," he said. "No curtains."

Ben stumbled backwards. "We're in public."

"There's no one here."

"But there could be," Ben said.

"Don't be paranoid," Johnny said. "I've spent two years putting up with paranoid, and you're supposed to be the person who puts that out of my mind."

That was why rebound sex was supposed to take place in the form of a one night stand. It was too much of a burden to put on someone more than once. But they were doing it to each other, so it was more fair. Not that fairness mattered when a few seconds pressed up against Johnny had gotten Ben half hard, his mind trying to slow things down because his body was so impatient. But Ben had never accomplished anything by working against his body. The trick was to push it harder in the direction it already wanted to go. 

He pulled Johnny forward by the wrist so they were up against each other again, and he kissed Johnny, hard and deeply. "Now come on up to my room before I come in my pants," he said.

He could feel Johnny relax against him, could feel him laughing. "You come off so shy," he said. "And then you say things like that."

Ben tugged him in the general direction of the elevator. "I'm trying to forget someone who hated that about me," he said.

"How could anyone hate that?" Johnny said. "It's adorable."

"You'd have to ask her."

"We are so underappreciated," Johnny said.

"I'll appreciate you," Ben said. He wished he could stuff it back in his mouth. It sounded like a long-term offer.

The elevator came. One of the Japanese coaches got in behind them and ruined Ben's plans of shoving his tongue down Johnny's throat on the way up. It was almost enough, knowing that Johnny would have been into it. Whenever Ben tried to be a gentleman, things got weird. As soon as he acted as aggressively as he felt, Johnny was all over him. He'd learned so much self-control: he'd been a quick study. He'd channeled all his emotions into music, climbing, dancing, skating. And here was this person asking him to release everything, to release it into him.

Ben did his best to look nonchalant when they reached their floor. Even if the coach spread rumors, there wouldn't be any foundation. They were friends. They had rooms on the same floor. Still, he heard the coach harrumph when he and Johnny got off the elevator together. 

They silently agreed to go to Johnny's room, because it was closer and because he had the impressive stockpile of condoms. Proving that he was stronger than he looked, he dragged Ben over to the desk in the corner of the room and pushed him back against it. Ben was wearing the black warmup pants he'd practiced in, and it was easy for Johnny to yank them down to his knees. "Jesus," Johnny said. "You weren't kidding."

"I'm very serious," Ben said.

Johnny pulled a condom out of the pocket of his jeans, ripped it open, and rolled it onto Ben's cock. "I was daydreaming about doing this during my warmups this morning," Johnny said. "I didn't think I'd actually get to." 

"You were thinking about me sucking your dick?" Ben said.

"No," Johnny said. His face broadened a million-watt smile: not the one he wore on TV, but mouth closed, eyes down, shy and personal and real. "I was thinking about doing this." Ben had trouble imagining someone fantasizing about giving a blow job. Receiving, yes, obviously, but giving? And it's not that he was opposed to the idea - he was becoming more in favor of it with every passing minute - but it wasn't exactly where his mind was likely to stray. He wondered if that meant he was straight after all. 

Johnny ran his tongue down Ben's cock, and the question instantly became irrelevant. Ben leaned back into the desk. With his eyes closed, it should have been just another blow job. Maybe it was the condom, which made things colder and a little sticky, although he could feel the warm pressure of Johnny's mouth just fine. Johnny had his tongue curved up so that it slid along Ben's cock every time Ben pushed his hips forward, a little bit of extra contact where he was most sensitive. He had a hand on each of Ben's thighs, and he was strong. Ben curled his toes in his shoes. Because he'd been holding it in, he came hard, with a groan, the power in the center of his body thrusting him forward, his knees buckling in the afterglow.

Johnny tossed the condom into the wastebasket under the desk. Ben took off his shoes and reached down to pull up his pants, which had bunched up at his ankles. "Hey, no," Johnny said when he saw what Ben was doing. "You should be naked. Like, all the time. When you're skating. Like the ancient Greeks."

"I think Tanith might have a problem with that," Ben said.

Johnny slid his hands under Ben's t-shirt and pushed it over his head. Ben felt exposed, more than a little, but Johnny had him pinned against the desk again. When he tried to say something, Johnny kissed him. He tasted like rubbery mint. Johnny brushed against Ben's leg, and Ben was surprised to feel how hard he was. It was like Johnny was making a point of not mentioning it. Ben stuck his hand down Johnny's pants. He barely brushed Johnny's cock with his fingertips, but Johnny gasped. "You don't have to," Johnny said.

"I don't have to get you off?" Ben said. "Are you _joking_?"

"I can be kind of a hard sell," Johnny said.

"You?" Ben said. "You came all over the bedspread last night and I didn't even touch your dick." He rubbed the tip of Johnny's cock with his thumb, trying to get another gasp out of him. "Listen, it's whatever you want."

"I don't know," Johnny said. "I'm not used to - I don't know."

"What? Talk to me."

"Fuck," Johnny said, shaking his head. "I just got out of a _really_ bad relationship. I didn't even realize."

"I'm sorry," Ben said.

"Do anything," Johnny said. "Just - do anything."

Ben pushed off the desk, got down on his knees, and undid Johnny's fly.

"Do you have any idea what you're doing?" Johnny said.

"I take direction really well," Ben said.

Johnny sighed. "Okay. Don't try to put the whole thing in your mouth at once, and breathe through your nose. And, shit, I think that was the only flavored condom I brought."

"Is that a problem?"

"Kind of. Maybe not. Do you have any weird diseases?"

"Nope."

"Do you trust me?"

"Not really," Ben said. But when Johnny didn't laugh, he corrected himself. "Yeah. I wouldn't be here if I didn't."

"Then, okay, it's not a problem," Johnny said. "Just don't fucking bite me or anything."

"So you just want me to -"

"Oh, God, please," Johnny said. "I just want you to stop talking and - yeah. That." Ben wasn't sure what he was doing right, but Johnny was speechless, clutching at his hair. It wasn't totally unlike sucking on a girl's nipples, that balance between pressure and tenderness. Johnny's skin was soft, and the taste was non-scary, and once he got used to the feeling of Johnny's cock swelling in his mouth, it was just rhythm, synchronizing his tongue to Johnny's hips. 

And then Johnny came in his mouth, and the shock and the force of it made him choke and cough, but Johnny was right there with a Kleenex and merciless teasing. "You were really good up until then," Johnny said. "Seriously. You have no idea, do you?"

Ben shrugged and got up. "I might," he said. 

"My ex, um, fuck. I shouldn't even say anything. You don't want to hear about it."

"I don't mind," Ben said.

"Oh, but you will."

"I've got my own set of bad relationship stories to air out," Ben said. "Believe me."

"You really want to listen to me bitch?"

"I really want to convince you that I can beat anything you come up with."

Johnny took his shirt off.

"What are you doing?" Ben said.

"If I'm going to make a list of every shitty thing Alex did to me over the past two years," he said, "I'm going to do it while lying naked in the arms of my new lover, who is a better skater than he will ever be and also has a better body. I mean, can you think of better revenge?"

The "new lover" thing was a little more than Ben could wrap his head around just yet, but he couldn't think of any better revenge.

*

Johnny was on a lot of drugs. Really, it was just muscle relaxants, but enough of them that he was completely blissed out. He couldn't walk a straight line or hold onto a thought, but he also couldn't feel his back. He'd thought about just going home the morning after his free skate, but he wasn't up to three hours in an airplane seat. Also, he felt oddly compelled to hang around for the free dance. If he couldn't pull out a half-decent program at Worlds, he could at least stick around and make sure that Ben skated well, and wow, was that a lot of emotion to be investing in a guy who he'd been fucking for all of five days and who would probably take his neck full of medals and go back to women as soon as he was back in Detroit. Johnny fell in love way too easily, and in a situation like this, it was about as fair as back spasms at the World Championships.

He might have been more likely to drop out of a fling than major international competition, but Ben had been unnecessarily, almost cruelly good to him the night before. Johnny had limped back to the hotel after the free skate, popped some muscle relaxants, and planned to sleep off the disappointment, but the numbing effect of the medication wasn't enough to stop him from reliving that triple flip, the way his ass and his chest had hit the ice. He'd put the TV on so it wouldn't be so quiet, but the noise had irritated him almost as much. It had taken excruciating effort to answer Ben's knock, but it would have been harder to turn him away. Especially since he'd shown up at the door with a hot water bottle shaped like a teddy bear. "Tanith's," he'd explained. And then he'd stayed the whole night.

Johnny stayed in bed all day, drifting in and out of sleep. He set his alarm for two hours before the free dance so he could take a shower, throw some clothes on, and limp down to the rink. The drugs made him apathetic, so he didn't spend half an hour on his hair, and the athletes' section of the bleachers was still pretty empty when he got there. Sasha, in a moment of dippy sweetness, turned down her iPod to ask him if he was all right. "Very heavily medicated," Johnny said.

"At least it's over for you," she said. "I'm so brain dead, I don't know how I'm going to skate tomorrow."

"Beautifully," Johnny said.

She smiled like she was trying to believe him. "You're so sweet," she said. "Like, when you want to be. So it means something."

"It's the muscle relaxants," he said.

"Yeah, whatever," she said, turning her iPod back up and closing her eyes.

The free dance seemed to go on forever, especially since Ben and Tanith skated second to last. Johnny slept through most of the second warmup group, and the programs that he was conscious for ran together after a while. But he woke up for Ben. Not even for Tanith, because for those four minutes he could not have shifted his gaze enough to look at her. He was far enough away to take in the whole perfect curve from the top of Ben's head to his free blade but close enough to see Ben's fighting smile when they passed close to the boards. Ben was such a good liar: he made himself weightless. He fucked up a little at the end, but it looked almost intentional, because there was a glow about him that might have been Johnny's narcotic haze but looked more like a self-possession and joy that Johnny had not seen him reach even in orgasm. Johnny wanted to be able to reach that, to lure it out of him. But wanting that showed him how unsafe he was even at this distance, and how selfish. 

Johnny convinced himself to go back to his room when the skating was over, although the stalker in him wanted to hang around the rink until Ben was done with the press. He hoped Ben would be too tired and too disappointed to come around. He hoped this thing between them would just fade away, and his feelings along with it. He took an extra muscle relaxant so his mind wouldn't keep him awake. 

It worked so well that the next thing he knew, there was desperate pounding on his door and Ben was shouting, "Jesus Christ, are you _dead_ in there?"

"Practically," Johnny yelled, hoping he was loud enough to be heard, because he wasn't sure if he could stand up. He struggled out of bed, bracing himself against the wall as he made his way to the door. 

"Wow," Ben said. "You have painkiller eyes."

"I couldn't sleep," Johnny said.

"How much did you take?" Ben said.

"Not that many."

"Don't _do_ that," Ben said. "I like you."

"Stop it," Johnny said.

"Stop liking you?"

"Liking me, being nice to me, coming here instead of going out and celebrating like you're supposed to after you medal. All of it. Stop."

"I would if I could," Ben said.

"But you're a nice person," Johnny said. "You're genuinely fucking nice." He lost his footing and had to catch himself on the wall. Maybe he _had_ taken one pill too many.

"You're going to hurt yourself," Ben said. "You're barely on your feet."

"I'm all right," Johnny said. "I'm not letting you in."

"Like hell you're not," Ben said. He moved too quickly for Johnny to stop him from lifting him off of his feet.

"Are you going to hold me over your head and spin me around?" Johnny said.

"Ceiling's too low," Ben said. "And you'd probably throw up on me." He lay Johnny down on the bed and spread the blankets over him. "What do they have you on? Vicodin?"

"No, they didn't put me on the normal stuff, it's muscle relaxants, what's it called? Ro-something. Rohypnol." Johnny kicked the covers off, which was enough vigorous physical activity to wear him out.

Ben laughed. "Did you get that from Dick Button?"

"What? He's not here."

"No. Seriously. Rohypnol is roofies. I think."

"So are you going to take advantage of me?" Johnny said.

"I'm going to get you some water," Ben said. 

Johnny must have fallen asleep in the time it took Ben to get to the bathroom and back, because waking up made his head throb. Ben was sitting on the other side of the bed, listening to Johnny's iPod. He looked perplexed. He'd taken his shoes off, and Johnny thought, ugly feet. When the rest of him, hidden, was so beautiful. "How long was I out?" Johnny said.

"Like an hour," Ben said. "You have really figure skater taste in music."

"You've been here the whole time?"

"I didn't want you to, like, choke on your own vomit," Ben said.

"You should've called Priscilla," Johnny said. "You should've gone home."

"You wanted me to call your coach?"

"She's not judgmental," Johnny said. "You really. You should have gone back to your own room."

"I guess I'm a nice person," Ben said.

"That's not nice," Johnny said. "That's crazy." That was the kind of thing people did when they were falling in love with you, Johnny thought. It might have been that his head was clearing, so everything felt like an epiphany, but he thought that might make it easier, if the feeling were mutual. It was too soon for a new boyfriend; he was still falling out of love with Alex. But if he were on the market, Ben would make a really good boyfriend, so good that it was unfair that Johnny was going to have to let him go.

"I was on Vicodin for, like, three weeks last year," Ben said. "When I hurt my knee. I said all this stuff that I don't remember."

"Did you, like, go around telling everyone how much you loved them?"

"I don't know," Ben said. "Merrie wouldn't tell me."

"Oh," Johnny said. "Oh. I -"

"No, you know what the shitty part is? I probably meant it. Whatever it was."

"I don't think it counts if you're on drugs," Johnny said.

"So when you told me you were in love with me -"

Johnny's heart raced with panic. "Oh, I _didn't_."

Ben sat there looking smug for a very long time before he said, "No. You just fell asleep."

"You know what? I take it back. You're not a nice person."

"Did I really have you fooled?" Ben said. He smiled, his eyes cast downward, and he still had Johnny fooled. A strand of hair had come loose from his ponytail, casting a spiral shadow on his cheek. Johnny reached over to brush it away, and Ben said, "Hey. Not when you're on drugs."

"I took most of them before the free dance," Johnny said. "They're wearing off." As if to confirm this, his back twinged, and he winced. 

"You went? You watched us?"

"I like watching you," Johnny said. "You're a fucking amazing skater."

"You should have stayed in bed and watched it on ESPN. I mean, we only came in third."

"Third is good," Johnny said. "Third is really good. I would have killed for third."

"Really? Who?"

"What?"

"Who would you have killed?" Ben said.

Johnny pretended to think for a moment. "Probably Evan," he said.

Ben shrugged and nodded. "That's fair."

"Not really," Johnny said. "The only fair thing is being better than everyone else."

"It occurs to me that it's a really good thing we don't skate in the same event," Ben said.

"Yeah. Tried that. Bad idea."

Ben still had Johnny's iPod in his hands. He unwound the ear buds and rewound them a few times, slowly. Johnny was trying to meditate away his back pain. He said, "You know what the worst is? I don't even get to do an exhibition program."

"Can you even stand up long enough to do an exhibition?" Ben said.

"It's my favorite thing," Johnny said. "Just skating for an audience, when there's no scoring and no judges? And I don't get to do it."

Ben furrowed his brow, like he wasn't sure how to express sympathy in the manner of earth people. Or, more likely, he was so unsure of where he was with Johnny that he didn't know whether a hug would be appropriate. Johnny understood that. A hug would have been weird. "What program were you going to do?" Ben said.

"With the week I've had? I'd probably have gone back to 'Unchained Melody.' You? I mean, which are you?"

"We're sticking with the Porn Number."

"The what?"

"Most of our programs have secret names," Ben said. He paused, then made an exaggerated gasp. "Shit, _secret_ names. If Tanith finds out, she'll kill you."

"Can't she kill Evan instead?"

"I could buy your silence with sex," Ben said. "Stop the violence before it starts."

"I thought I was on too many drugs for sex."

"You may be okay. Let me check." He pivoted on his knee and swung his leg over so he was sitting in Johnny's lap. He held up a finger to make Johnny follow it with his eyes, then touched the finger to Johnny's lips. Johnny smiled underneath it and closed his eyes, expecting a kiss. Instead, Ben slipped his other hand down the front of Johnny's pants. Surprised, Johnny jerked up into his hand. Ben said flirtatiously, "I think you're okay." At the same time, Johnny said, "I think you threw my back out."

"Should I just forget about it?" Ben said.

"Fuck, no," Johnny said. "Just go easy."

"So you don't want me to throw your legs up over your head?"

"I can lie on my side," Johnny said. "Maybe on my stomach."

"Or you can stay where you are, and I can go down on you," Ben said.

"Since when do you like going down on me?"

"I like it when you're quiet," Ben said. He got a death glare out of Johnny before he added, "I like it when you're happy."

"Who said you made me happy?" 

"You could have gotten on a plane yesterday, couldn't you?" Ben said.

Johnny ran both his hands through Ben's hair, pushing it loose. "Stop being logical and blow me already."

"You smile with your whole body," Ben said. "It's really beautiful."

Don't call me beautiful, Johnny tried to say. He tried to tell Ben not to say anything, not because he liked Ben when he was quiet, but because it was exactly the opposite, especially since Ben was a quiet guy, like he only wanted to say things if they mattered. When Ben said something funny or sweet or brilliantly dirty, Johnny started to think it wasn't too soon for a new relationship. Not that Ben would agree to it.

He closed his eyes. The drugs had worn most of the way off, but it still hurt to think. He wished Ben would hurry up and take his mind away.

"Hey," Ben said. "It doesn't matter how beautiful you are, I can't do anything to you if you have pants on."

His eyes still closed, Johnny smiled gently and took his pants off. He wondered if his whole body was smiling again, if he had happy feet and happy elbows. A happy penis, and he laughed to himself, except that while he was making a joke of it Ben was wrapping his lips around the end of his cock, his fist around the shaft and his thumb caressing Johnny's balls. Johnny thought, coordination, that was a good quality to look for in a boyfriend.

*

Ben and Tanith got on a plane to New York right after exhibitions. They'd been booked for interviews on ESPN2 and CSC that they hadn't had time for after the Olympics. They both liked doing press. They liked being the center of attention, especially when it was blocked out in brief segments and they could be left alone afterwards.

There were a bunch of skaters on their plane. A lot of people trained on the East Coast, in Connecticut or Delaware, and a lot of the Europeans were catching connections back to Moscow or Rome or Helsinki. A grim mood hung over the flight: a combination of exhaustion, competitive envy, and the deadening recognition that they had ahead of them a long, slow summer of practice and exhibition skating. All of the skaters leaned back in their seats, cocooned in the privacy of their own music.

Johnny was sitting a couple of rows up. It figured. They'd left things too open-ended the night before, parting with a sort of implied agreement that this was the end, but not talking about it. Ben had suffered two or three rough patches with Merrie as the results of things he'd assumed were "implied agreements," and he wasn't looking forward to going through that again.

When the seat belt light went off, Ben came over to Johnny's seat. Johnny beckoned for him to lean close. "Bathroom in the back of the plane in fifteen minutes," Johnny said, the tone of his voice not leaving any room for negotiation. It was distantly possible that Johnny only wanted a private conversation, but it looked more likely that he'd assumed a very different kind of implied agreement.

Ben went back to his seat and got out the book he still hadn't finished reading. Ten minutes later, Johnny passed by him, heading towards the back of the plane, not pausing to say hi. Ben waited a few more minutes, then went back and knocked on the bathroom door. Johnny reached out a slender arm and pulled him in.

Johnny locked the door and pushed Ben back against the sink cabinet, kissing him roughly and tugging at his belt. Ben abandoned all hope of conversation. He lifted Johnny up by his ass, and Johnny wrapped his legs around Ben's knees, wedging himself into the cramped space and making it clear that any back pain was far overshadowed by his desire to have sex in an airplane bathroom. He ground against Ben and almost fell, but Ben grabbed him by the hips and dipped him slowly backward so he was lying across the toilet. Johnny pushed his pants down to his ankles and clasped his hands under his knees. He rolled back and braced his shoulders against the wall so he was almost sitting upright. Ben had to kneel on the damp floor to get the angle right. But it was a rush to know that half of the international figure skating community was sitting on the other side of a thin wall. The people in the back rows could have heard them if they were listening carefully. 

"You finally got me with my legs over my head," Johnny said, struggling to pull his pants up with one leg on either side of the toilet bowl.

Ben tried to laugh, but he couldn't get started. He was having too many thoughts. Conflicting thoughts. And the situation should have been simple: they couldn't keep doing this. They couldn't _date_. A long-distance relationship that they'd have to keep secret, with both of them in the public eye? It wasn't worth it. If it didn't kill them both, it would kill their careers. But he couldn't get the words out.

"Are you, um, staying in New York?" he said instead.

"We have a whole week until rehearsals start for Champs on Ice," Johnny said. "I'm not allowed to skate until my back heals, so I thought if I'm going to spend a week doing nothing, I should do it where there's good healing energy, you know?"

Ben didn't know. When he was nursing an injury, he let his mom take care of him. "Sure," Ben said.

"Are you? I mean - are you getting a connection somewhere, or -" 

"We're doing some press," Ben said. "We'll be there, like, two days."

"Will you have time to sneak out? Because we could -" Johnny cut himself off, and his face exploded into a wide grin. He clasped Ben's hands. Ben got the impression if there had been more space in the bathroom, he would have jumped up and down. "You should stay the whole week," he said.

"I really can't," Ben said. "I have to be back in Detroit on Wednesday."

"For what? The season's over."

"We have plane tickets. And Tanith will flip out. And our _coaches_. And -"

"And I have this gorgeous hotel room with a king-size bed in this gorgeous hotel, kind of between Times Square and Hell's Kitchen, I swear, it's all glass and dark wood, very postmodern. And I have friends I want you to meet, and we could go skating in Central Park, and - and -" 

"I don't know," Ben said. "I don't know if it's the best thing."

"Fine," Johnny said. "Never mind." His mouth was a thin line, and his eyes were cast down. But there was nowhere for him to look that wasn't at Ben.

"It's - I had a good time this week. I, um, I like you a lot and, and everything. But I have a career to worry about. I can't just -"

"All right. If that's all it was to you, then I guess - just, just stop talking." Johnny reached over Ben's shoulder and unlocked the bathroom door. 

Ben re-locked the door. He took a deep breath. "It's not," he said. "All it was. That's the fucking _problem_."

"Then make it not the problem," Johnny said. "If that's the only thing keeping you from - from being with me, or whatever, then - I've been doing this since I was sixteen, for fuck's sake. I don't have a _choice_. You can go back to Detroit if you want and find some girl who'll reaffirm your masculinity, or whatever. But some of us don't get that option. I - I'd forgotten what it was like to spend my whole day looking forward to just being _near_ someone, and you - you made me remember that. And if you felt anything even close to that, then - I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying anymore."

Ben knew exactly what he was saying. He was saying that he was falling in love, and it scared the crap out of him. Which made two of them. He tried to say that, but it didn't work. "I . . . yeah," was what came out.

"Okay," Johnny said.

"I'll, um, I'll see if I can change my plane ticket," Ben said.

"Only do it if you mean it," Johnny said. 

"I do," Ben said. "I want to." He thought about kissing Johnny, and he could have. But kissing him would have made it look like he was lying. "I'm gonna go ask. Like, right now."

"Just - just let me know," Johnny said. "Call me. Or text me, or whatever."

"I'll put a note in your bag."

"Just don't send me an e-mail." 

Now was a much better time to kiss Johnny, and to have it be true.


	2. Short Program. Original Dance.

Johnny sat in the hotel bed, propped up on a pile of pillows, stripped down to his underpants. He could have been out partying, getting wasted and picking up boys, like you were supposed to after an ugly breakup. Instead, he'd bought himself a corned beef sandwich and a bottle of Merlot and hidden in his room. He'd finally collapsed under his exhaustion, and he was tired of other people. Besides, Ben was going to be on TV in half an hour. It was going to be trippy, watching the guy he'd spent the past week fucking give an interview on national television. When Ben was skating, it was always clear that he was playing a character. On TV, he'd be pretending to be himself. Ben and Tanith were notoriously good with the press, and it would be satisfying, knowing which parts of himself Ben had to hide.

He sat through the end of a college basketball game, followed by half an hour of basketball news. Apparently, out in the real world, people were paying more attention to March Madness than Worlds. He flipped through _Vogue_ and drank wine from the bottle. He got absorbed in the fashion ads and almost missed it when Tanith and Ben's interview started. The beginning of the interview was standard and shallow: how does it feel to win, what's your favorite component, who are your favorite skaters other than yourselves. The kind of questions that every top-level athlete has easy, generic answers for. The anchor asked about their immigration woes, flung a witticism about having a law named after them, ended up entirely lowballing the issue. Johnny was surprised: usually, the reporters on _Sports Night_ liked to pretend they were real journalists.

Just when Johnny was about to give up on her, the interviewer smiled cruelly. "One of the things we always hear about your skating is how much chemistry you have on the ice," she said. "But in a sport where so many of the teams are married, you're one of the few who have never been romantically involved. How do you create such _undeniable_ sexual tension in your programs?"

"It's theater," Tanith said. "It's a performance. It's part of the sport." Good answer, Johnny thought, but they weren't going to get away with it.

"It's like actors who have a lot of chemistry in a movie, but in real life, they're both with other people," Ben said. "And if they were in a movie with the people they were actually with, you know, it wouldn't work as well. If we skated with our, like, the people we're actually with, you probably wouldn't see the chemistry. It's two different things." 

"So you're both involved with other skaters?" the reporter asked, because Ben had basically handed her the question.

"I'm not," Tanith said quickly. The camera caught her looking right at Ben with her eyebrows raised.

"I am," Ben said, and Johnny's heart leapt. 

"Anyone we've heard of?" the reporter said.

"Depends on who you've heard of," Ben said. "And that's all I'm saying." The reporter opened her mouth and sucked in her breath, then shook her head and moved on. It was all easy questions from then on. How do you think your success will change people's views of ice dancing? What do you have planned for next season? If you could skate to any song, what would it be? 

Johnny waited until the end of the hour to call Ben and congratulate him on getting through an Uncomfortably Personal Interview. "You didn't even fluff a pronoun," he said.

"I like dealing with the press," Ben said. "I like watching all the blood drain out of their square little faces."

"They're cute when they're flustered."

"Like bunnies."

" _Exactly_ like bunnies," Johnny said. "Where are you?"

"In a taxi."

"Going where?"

"I don't actually know," Ben said. "Probably my hotel, since it's midnight."

"Come _here_ ," Johnny said.

"Can't."

"Why not? You're involved with me. You said so on TV. I _saw_ you."

"We're doing this show on ESPN2 at, like, seven in the morning," Ben said. "And then we're doing fucking Telemundo, because apparently they can't find any Latino athletes who speak actual Spanish."

"But tomorrow night?" Johnny said.

"Tomorrow night," Ben said. "And I am."

"What?"

"Involved with you," Ben said. "I said so. On TV."

"I saw you," Johnny said.

*

Ben wouldn't have thought he'd get used to sleeping next to someone so quickly, or that he'd feel Johnny's absence so much. Johnny was in some other hotel room in some other part of the city, and Ben's bed felt hard and empty. He tried to blame it on the bright city lights or the incessant noise from the hallway, but he knew it had more to do with the absence of a warm body next to him. Merrie hadn't stayed the night that often, and they'd been long distance a lot of the time. Johnny might have been the first person he'd slept next to for a whole week. Their bodies had fit into one another so easily.

Not that he'd had time for much sleep. He hadn't gotten back to the hotel until almost 1 AM, and although he'd set his own alarm clock for 5:30, he got a wake-up call half an hour earlier. Johnny would have been swearing at the phone, but Ben was too sleepy even for that. If he was being woken up early, the plans had changed somehow: another interview on their schedule or someone famous who wanted to meet them. He engaged in some whirlwind grooming and got dressed for television. Realizing that he didn't know where he was supposed to be until six, he brewed a pot of disgusting hotel room coffee and sat back in the armchair, almost willing to believe that he'd finally been granted some time to read.

He'd finished all of half a page when someone knocked insistently on the door, like a drug bust in a movie. He chained the door before he opened it, hoping that it wasn't a deranged fan. Was he famous enough to get attacked by deranged fans? He'd gotten some letters and e-mails that had sounded pretty unglued. Tanith insisted on saving them, saying that she was going to read them out loud on Halloween.

But when he opened the door, it was his publicist. "We need to talk about your boyfriend," Mike said, making Ben wish it had been a deranged fan after all.

"Okay," Ben said. "What boyfriend?"

"Cute. Listen. The entire skating community knows. You were seen leaving his room in the athletes' lodge a couple of times. You might have thought you were being careful, but--"

"There's no such thing," Ben said.

"Exactly. And it's not like I'm saying you should break it off or anything. You're not the only gay athlete we represent, and your personal life is your business. But it _is_ a PR problem, and before you do any more press, we need to decide how you're going to be dealing with it."

He'd cringed when Mike had referred to him as a gay skater, but it wasn't worth the trouble of pointing that out. He had a boyfriend. It was splitting hairs. "Was it really bad last night?"

"It was pretty good, all things considered," Mike said. "It's all right to be coy like that, as long as you're consistent. USFSA tends to freak out when people, like, show up on the cover of _The Advocate_ , but if there's some plausible deniability in place, you're safe."

"But people know? Like, they know who I'm seeing and stuff?"

"After last night? Honey, you tied yourself in knots avoiding those pronouns. Even if they don't know it's Johnny, they know it's a boy."

"Jesus," Ben said. "I mean, we've been together a week. And I don't know - it might not even last another week. He might be the only guy I ever sleep with, and it's like you're saying this is going to go on my permanent record."

"It is," Mike said. "That's what being a public figure means. It's not just skating on TV and signing autographs and winning shiny medals. You can't do things and expect them not to have consequences."

Ben rested his chin heavily in his hands. He tried to convince himself that he'd made a bad decision. A string of bad decisions. He had a feeling, though, that something like this would have happened eventually, with someone else if not with Johnny. Sooner or later, there would have been a boy, and he wouldn't have said no.

"Relax," Mike said. "You're a male figure skater. Nobody cares. Nobody's _surprised_."

Ben managed a laugh. "So I just . . ."

"Be yourself. Don't lie. Change the subject if it gets weird," Mike said. "The press loves you, so they'll go relatively easy on you. And Tanith, she knows what's going on?"

"It's kind of her fault."

"Then she'll cover for you if you get flustered." Mike patted Ben's arm. "Don't worry about it."

"Okay," Ben lied.

"Really. I'm sorry I made you worry. Your ride will be here at six. Why don't you get yourself some breakfast?" 

"I'll go in a minute," Ben said. Just stop talking, he added in his mind.

"Okay. I'll give you some space. See you downstairs at six."

Ben thumped back into the armchair, his limbs loose and exhausted. He drank his coffee, which was now cold as well as weak and bitter. He wished it were later so he could call Johnny. He imagined Johnny asleep, his slim body sprawled across a huge bed in another hotel in another part of town, then shook the image out of his mind and opened up his book. If he couldn't have that, he thought he at least deserved ten minutes in outer space.

*

Johnny devoted his lonely Monday to retail therapy. He felt at home under the high ceilings and bright track lighting of Chelsea boutiques, surrounded by shoes and bags. The salesgirls at Balenciaga and Nicole Farhi scurried to attend to him, and he apologized demurely, saying he was just browsing. Sometimes, that attentiveness was a perk of fame that he exploited, but today, he just wanted to bask in the beautiful clothes. He did buy a few things -- a pair of sunglasses, a belt -- but when he pulled his credit card out, it felt like a redundant gesture.

He shouldn't have been buying things for himself; he should have been looking for a gift for Ben. Not that there was anything in a couture boutique that Ben would want. Ben was such a _guy_ in his interests and his tastes, the kind whose definition of an outfit was a shirt and jeans, neither of which smelled funny. And the things Ben was passionate about, Johnny didn't understand at all. Blues records, vintage video games, paintball equipment: he hadn't recognized those as things that a person even could be obsessed with. When they were together, it seemed like he and Ben had everything in the world in common, everything that was important, but when Johnny stepped back from himself, he was amazed that they had anything to talk about other than skating. 

Hungry, and simultaneously energized and discouraged by his new mission, Johnny drifted southward. All of the bodegas had flowers out: cheap carnations and daisies, obviously dyed roses. Johnny had never bought anyone flowers. He was the kind of boy that people bought flowers _for_. Ben was confused enough already.

By the time he found lunch, he was halfway to Soho. Most of the time, he preferred Madison Avenue, but he was so close that it felt like fate. He wandered in and out of the unfamiliar boutiques; he couldn't stop thinking about flowers. In one store, full of clothes by a designer he'd never heard of, he was drawn to a women's shirt with blue and green stripes and an unusual lapel. When he tried it on, it hugged him perfectly. It even seemed to butch him up a little. Admiring himself in the mirror, it occurred to him that Ben didn't expect anything from him. What made Ben uncomfortable was all those moments when he felt pushed to move more quickly than he was ready for. And he'd be exhausted after running from interview to interview. The best thing that Johnny could do was find him a good meal and then protect him from the world for a while.

Johnny bought the shirt and took the subway uptown. When he came up to the surface in Times Square, he noticed a bodega with flowers out front. He decided, what the hell, it would just be another dramatic gesture. If Ben couldn't handle dramatic gestures, he needed to move on. Johnny bought a dozen red roses and carried them back to the hotel cradled against his chest so their scent rose up into his mouth.

*

Ben stood outside the hotel, his gym bag slung over his shoulder and his suitcase balanced on its wheels, his arms full of free TV station crap and gifts from fans. He'd been stuck all afternoon at a rink in Brooklyn, meeting a group of contest winners that had been comprised entirely of eight-year-old ice princesses, their tyrannical skating mommies, and socially awkward women bearing scrapbooks and homemade his-and-hers crocheted scarves. Normally, he at least enjoyed the little kids, but it was hard to judge a shoot-the-duck contest when he had sex on his mind. He'd been able to keep the X-rated thoughts in check for the duration of the morning, but the sleep deprivation had stripped away his focus by lunchtime. It made him anxious, struggling that hard to keep himself centered.

The walk through the lobby and the elevator ride looked ominous and impossibly long, like the first notes of new free dance music. He kept his head down: being recognized would make the walk even longer. He managed to stay invisible until the elevator, where a woman said, "Hey, weren't you in the Olympics or something? Are you that skier?"

"No," Ben said, and he was going to leave it there, but his memory flashed briefly to the fact that he enjoyed his fans. Even when they weren't fans so much as attentive channel surfers. "Figure skater," he added.

She squinted at him for a few moments. "Oh, wow! You won a medal, didn't you?" She rummaged in a gigantic purse and produced a digital camera. "I've been in New York all of two hours, and I met my first celebrity. I'm so glad I let my sister talk me out of Las Vegas." She held up the camera. "Do you mind?"

"Not at all," he said. He put his arm around her shoulder and grinned falsely. 

The elevator dinged and wheezed to a halt. He hitched his bag up higher on his shoulder and got out. As the doors closed, the woman shouted, "Wait! What was your name again?" But she was gone before he could do anything but laugh. She'd find someone to tell her, he hoped.

He expected his heart to pound when he reached the door to Johnny's room, but for the first time all day, he felt like he had his blades under him. He was still knocking when the door opened. "Hello, stranger," Johnny whispered, unhooking the chain. His arms were full of red roses. 

Ben accepted them, but they made him uncomfortable. His mom used to give him flowers when he would lose competitions, the silly bouquets they sold in the lobby. And red roses made him think of serial killers. He saw that Johnny had filled the ice bucket with water, and he placed the roses in it, smiling his thanks dishonestly. "Sorry I took so long," Ben said. "I made a new fan in the elevator."

"How cute! Were there pictures?" 

"She pulled that camera out like a gun."

"Did she make you sign a body part?" Johnny said.

"She didn't have time," Ben said.

"So you didn't get to see her scrapbook?"

"Jesus. Every other sport, the fans paint their faces and, like, tailgate."

"People should totally tailgate skating competitions," Johnny said. "There would be, like, canapés and boxed wine."

"How big of a problem is it that the word 'canapés' is making me hungry?" Ben said.

"Big. They didn't feed you?"

"I have vague memories of a lettuce wrap about a million years ago," Ben said. "I think it was stale."

Johnny cupped Ben's face in his hands. It jarred Ben to be abruptly reminded that his and Johnny's eyes were at the same level. He seemed so slight until Ben got close to him, so unlike an athlete until Ben felt his solidity. His eyes were intense, searching, and he looked like he was about to ask something serious and important. He might have been, and changed his mind. "What is your very favorite thing in the world to eat?" he said. It wasn't the question that Ben was ready for, and Ben found himself silenced. Johnny said, "Come on. I will still respect you."

"Thai food," Ben said. "Noodles."

"Thank God. I thought you were going to drag me to Friendly's or something." Johnny went over to the nightstand with the phone on it and opened the cabinet underneath. "There's got to be someplace in this neighborhood that delivers Thai. If somebody didn't steal the phone book. Or, wait. How nervous do you have to be?"

"About what?"

"About being seen together," Johnny said.

"My publicist said don't come out," Ben said. "Like I'd even know what to come out as."

"Okay. Did he tell you to make up a girlfriend?"

"He told me people already kind of knew," Ben said. "He endorsed the clever use of pronouns."

"Good," Johnny said.

"Better than winding up like poor Timmy Goebel." Timothy Goebel had dumped his boyfriend out of Catholic guilt, which was sad enough, but his repeated pronouncements of his intention to "try heterosexuality" were what had earned him the pity of the entire skating community, regardless of sexual orientation. It was kind of an insult to everybody, but he was more of a casualty than an instigator. And an illustration of how important it was to have good representation.

"Poor Timmy," Johnny said. "He had the nicest boyfriend, too." He gave up on his phone book search and pulled a pair of loafers out from under the bed. "Do you care if people take pictures?" he said.

"Of us?"

"Of us _together_ ," Johnny said.

"I'm cool with it as long as I don't have to sign any body parts."

"Then we should go out walking," Johnny said. "We should find a place that will make you noodles, because there is no reason why we can't walk down a city street together." He sat down on the bed and moved to put his shoes on, but Ben tackled him down. "I thought you wanted to get food," Johnny said.

Ben bit the back of Johnny's neck. "I guess I'm not quite ready to be seen with you yet," he said.

*

Ira was in New York. This frightened Johnny a little, because he'd been avoiding her phone calls. He worried that she would berate him for his poor performance at Worlds, and he was even more afraid that she'd scold him for the whole Ben thing. As far as she knew, they'd hooked up once and never spoken of it again. Johnny liked it that way. He felt safer, being able to keep it a secret from someone.

But she was in New York, seeing a doctor about her vasculitis. The pain, she said, was so severe that she couldn't feel her toes, like her body didn't want her to know how bad it was. He tried to imagine what he would do if his body betrayed him so thoroughly. There was a chance that it was already doing that. Backs, his doctor had told him, were touchy; sometimes when you threw them out, they stayed permanently thrown. He'd tied himself up in knots until his spine went on strike. The spasms were easing in frequency and intensity, but he hadn't done anything more strenuous than urban hiking since his long program at Worlds. It was a dangerous thing for an athlete not to trust his own body. What would he do if he didn't get better? He would die. He wasn't as strong as Ira.

He invited Ben to come to lunch with them, but Ben was good at sensing when he was going to feel like a fifth wheel. Ben had never seen Ground Zero, and Johnny had seen it more times than his fragile heart could stand, so Ben didn't complain about having the afternoon to himself. He slung his backpack over his shoulder, kissed Johnny's lips quickly, and was on the phone with Tanith before he was even out the door. Johnny wondered if he was so casual about it so that Johnny would be sure he was coming back at the end of the day.

Johnny and Ira were both ten minutes late for lunch, and they ran into each other at the entrance to the restaurant. She almost passed for healthy, with color in her cheeks and a bright smile on her face. She'd lost a little weight, though, and there were shadows under her eyes. "It is so warm," she said. "I brought only winter clothes. I had to go shopping."

"Cry me a river," Johnny said. She was one of the only people he'd ever met who could look tough in magenta. He petted a silk sleeve and said, "It suits you."

"I am wearing only happy colors," she said. "I hope they'll give me a happy spirit."

"Oh," Johnny said. "So it's . . . not good?"

"The doctor, he was giving me less medication," Ira said. "That is normal, they say, it is remission. But now I am worse again, so he gives me more medicine. He says I am okay, I can go on tour, I can compete in fall. So it is good news, I think."

"So no retirement, then?" he said.

"I still do not have my gold," Ira said. "How can I retire?"

He wanted to say that at least she had a medal, but this wasn't a good time to make it all about him. "I'm glad," he said. "I would've missed you."

She grinned, pleased with herself. "That is not a thing you say lightly," she said.

"Oh, ninety percent of people in skating, I wouldn't miss at _all_ if they dropped dead tomorrow," Johnny said.

"So I am special," she said. "Top ten percent."

"Top five, at least," Johnny said. The waitress came around, and they ordered. "So," he said when she'd left. "Remember that straight guy I told you about on the phone?"

"The ice dancer," Ira said. "Who you were not to be seeing again."

"He's here," Johnny whispered. It felt like a thing that had to be whispered. "Like, not _here_ , but he's in New York. With me."

She clasped his hands in hers and shook her head derisively. "Oh, _Vanya_ ," she said. "You are _mudilo_."

"It's my fault, too," he said. "I talked him into it."

"Remember you are making me a promise," Ira said.

"I'm not in love with him," Johnny said. "Not, like, not yet. I just felt like, I felt like I wasn't done yet. Like I needed more time. Because he - I _like_ him. He's funny, and he's hot, and he's - he's kind. Like, you don't think of people being kind, but he is. And he looks at me like, like I want to be behind his eyes so I can see what he sees when he looks at me."

"But you are not in love with him?" Ira said.

"Not yet," Johnny said. "I'm trying not to be."

"You are not doing very good job," Ira said.

"I know," he said, and she laughed. "I know, but it's like, have you ever looked back on a situation and realized that it was bad the whole time? But you couldn't see it while you were in it?"

She shook her head emphatically. "No," she said, and he believed her.

"Well, I have," he said. "And the longer I - this - Ben goes on, the more I -"

"Ah," Ira said. "Your ice dancer, he has name."

"Oh, come on," Johnny said. "Ice dancer, not Russian, not married, how many options are there?"

"I thought Ben Agosto _is_ married," she said.

"He had a girlfriend," Johnny said, letting a self-satisfied smile play on his lips. "He doesn't anymore."

"And you are having something to do with this?"

"No," he said. "They broke up, like, right before. Right before Worlds."

"Like you," she said. She nodded slowly. "I see."

"That was the whole point," Johnny said. "We were supposed to, like, distract each other. Just for the night, and then just for the week, and then just until my back healed. But the more I'm with him, it's like, the more I think, I spent two years with someone who I'm not sure even liked me. Who I think tolerated me, maybe, and I was so in love with him that I didn't care. And now I've been with this person who, like, I make him laugh. I make these crazy suggestions and he's like, 'Hell, yes.' And he, like, when we're in - I mean -"

"You can talk to me about sex," she said. "I am not embarrassed. I have had some."

"It's not you I'm worried about," Johnny said.

"So he is good in bed?" she said.

"Oh my _God_ ," Johnny said. When she'd stopped laughing, he added, "No, the thing is, he's always like, 'What do you want, where do you want me, is it right, is it working?' And I'm, like, still kind of amazed that he cares. But of course he cares. I always cared whether Alex was, like - and I realized, I let myself be in love with someone who didn't care if I fucking got off."

"You didn't know," she said. "You were young when you met him, no? Eighteen?"

"Nineteen," Johnny said. "It was right at the end of that bad year." He didn't have to explain which one. The bad year was the year when he had been in too much pain to skate, when he'd almost had to quit skating permanently. The thought of having to retire so young, so early, had messed with his head. Alex had been an escape from that. It was as if Alex had been the first open door he'd seen, and he'd run through it without looking to see if there was another way out.

"Then you are blaming yourself too much," Ira said.

"Am I?" he said. He lowered his voice to just above a whisper. "Because, okay, you wanted me to tell you about the sex? I'll tell you about the sex. We'll be, like, walking down the street, and he'll grab my arm and whisper how much he wants me, and it'll be like, okay, one of those times, I had to fucking drag him to the men's room at the Met. Don't laugh; this is serious. He, like, he'll be happy to see I'm hard because that means he gets to go down on me, and Ira? I'd let myself get convinced I didn't like blow jobs, when all the time I was just getting shitty service. I spent two years and four months with a guy who wanted me flat on my stomach with my dick between my legs so he wouldn't have to fucking look at me, and now? The night before we left Calgary, Ben had my dick in his hand, and I'm like, 'Do you know how good that feels?' And he says, 'Obviously.' Like, of course he knows, that's the point. And afterwards, I was thinking, if he knows, then - then Alex had to know. He had to know and just not want to give it. And I wonder, I keep wondering, how is it fair which one I had to be in love with and which one I have to move on from because the fucking timing is wrong?"

"It is unfair," Ira said. "But does it change? It is too soon. You know."

"I know," Johnny said. "I don't have much of a heart left. I don't have anything to give him."

"And also, you have made a promise," Ira said. 

Johnny was quiet for a while, looking out the window at the flurry of humanity. He wasn't waiting for Ira to give in, to release him from his word. She was more stubborn than he was. But he was waiting for something. It felt like the right moment for a stranger to come in from the street and tell him that it was all right, that he had been granted a special exemption from all common sense. To tell him that he had good instincts. But that would have been a lie; Johnny had horrible instincts, and he knew it. Ira was protecting him. Even if he wound up setting her advice aside, she was giving it. She wasn't expecting him to throw himself into this on his own. 

"Can I break it?" he said.

"Of course not," she said. "You made, you will keep."

He was about to agree to this grudgingly, but his phone beeped to tell him he had a text message. It was from Ben, naturally. He'd cried at Ground Zero. He considered it totally Johnny's fault. 

Johnny wasn't aware of the look on his face, but it must have given everything away, because Ira said, "You are not going to keep your promise. You are already breaking."

"I'm trying," he said. "God help me, I'm trying. I'm going to try until it hurts."

"And then you will keep trying."

"Probably."

"Definitely."

"If it weren't for the pain," he said, "I honestly don't think I'd bother."

"I know," she said, and as usual, he believed her.

*

Once Johnny stopped even trying to keep his promise to Ira, he had room to look at things from the outside, to live inside the magic of that week and leave the rest of the summer up to fate. He stopped feeling guilty for noticing all of the cute things Ben did, the relationship things. For example, Ben had become very hung up on the word "boyfriend," and he slipped into a sort of self-deprecating butch chivalry that Johnny thought was cute, waking Johnny with kisses and holding doors open for him. He had crazy serious-athlete priorities like finding a gym within walking distance and getting up at 6 AM every morning, no matter how late they'd stayed up having sex the night before, to attack the rock climbing wall and the elliptical machine. This alone elicited Priscilla's approval, so Johnny took it as a good sign. Toward the end of the week, he grew restless enough that early-morning exercise machines started to sound like fun, but Priscilla was adamant that he go easy on his back.

He did not mention to her that he had spent most of the week on his hands and knees, although he entertained himself thinking about the look she would give him if he did. His family was almost okay with his sexuality by now, but it was like they didn't know how they'd managed to produce him. But Priscilla could be completely happy for him, could understand how he'd completely fucked up at Worlds but still come away feeling like he'd won something.

She told him he was allowed to go skating in Central Park as long as he didn't try anything more strenuous than waltz jumps. Ben was so into that idea, he insisted they rent skates. Of course, they were immediately recognized, so they couldn't run ice derby around the rink and terrorize small children. Or hold hands while they glided in slow strokes, like some other couples on the ice. Johnny loved the limelight, loved having fans. He wouldn't have given that up for the chance to kiss his boyfriend in public. But it pissed him off that he had to choose between them.

They made only the barest attempts to conceal themselves. They made sure the hallway was clear before they left their hotel room, but they left together and took the same elevator. They went to quiet bars instead of nightclubs and ate at neighborhood restaurants rather than anyplace _haute cuisine_ or scene-y. But those were choices they probably would have made anyway: Ben preferred ethnic and spicy to expensive and fancy, and he didn't like normal dancing, just stuff like salsa and swing that Johnny didn't know how to do. So they got to sit at narrow tables for two in tiny dark places, talking and gazing into each other's eyes, which was what they both wanted to do anyway.

And weirdly enough, that did seem to be what Ben wanted to do. Johnny kept expecting there to be brooding and _agitá_ , but if Ben felt anxiety, he didn't show it. He was even-tempered; he laughed a lot. Johnny liked that about him, found the lack of drama refreshing, but he didn't trust it. It was possible that Ben really was that calm, or that he was confiding in Tanith or someone when Johnny wasn't around. But Johnny worried anyway, because he couldn't not.

The closest Ben got to a moment of panic, at least that Johnny could see, was one early morning when he got up to go to the gym. Johnny was a light sleeper, so he opted to ogle Ben quietly instead of faking unconsciousness. "Why do you watch me like that?" Ben said. 

"Because I like watching you," Johnny said.

"It's weird," Ben said.

"It's how you watch me," Johnny said. Ben started to protest, but Johnny said, "No, it exactly is."

"Maybe," Ben said.

"Don't fucking 'maybe' me," Johnny said. If it had been later in the day, he might have held it in, but he was touchy in the morning. That was why he normally watched and didn't talk.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ben said.

"It means we've been fucking for a week and a half, and you need to get over yourself," Johnny said.

"Whatever. I'm going."

"No," Johnny said.

"I'm not going?" Ben said.

"No. You're not just leaving when we need to talk about something. Because that will make me hate you."

Ben looked down heavily. Johnny could see old hurt there, stuff he knew he didn't have access to yet. Johnny thought Ben might curl into a prickly ball, put up all his sharpest defenses. But Johnny had caught him before he'd had a chance to literally work out his aggression, and perhaps that was why he let out a "Fine. Talk," that was barely on the edge of control.

"Never mind," Johnny said. 

"Do you want me here or do you not want me here? Make a fucking decision."

"I always want you here," Johnny said.

"Except that you don't," Ben said. 

"No. I want you _here_. Not in your head worrying about whatever you're not telling me about."

"Look, I - I'm not - You think there's something going on, but there's really not. There's not." 

"Whatever," Johnny said. He rolled over and pretended to go back to sleep. After Ben had shut the door, Johnny popped a couple of Advil, which were enough to calm the vestiges of his back pain but not enough to silence his busy mind.

*

Ben's trip to the gym was an exercise in seeing how many excuses he could find to prolong his own absence. He hated fighting. The reason he'd managed to skate with Tanith for so long was that they never argued. Teased, pushed each other, but never out and out fought. They redirected their energy, was how he liked to think of it.

He'd never fought with Merrie, either. And look where that had gotten him.

He did most of his best thinking when he was working out. The repetitive motion relaxed his mind, and listening to music cut him off from the rest of the world. It was supposedly a bad idea to go on the Stairmaster or the elliptical trainer with your eyes closed - it messed with your equilibrium and made you seasick - but Ben did it anyway. He liked the sensation of flying, of being outside his own body. 

Ben was desperate not to go back to the hotel. He even did a round of free weights, which he'd been avoiding. He got strange looks from other people in weight rooms, because he didn't look like he could lift half as much as he could. In New York, it seemed people didn't take kindly to the "Yes, and I could also lift you over my head" smile. He wondered if they thought he was flirting. He wondered why he cared what they thought.

He wondered why he couldn't just go back and be honest with Johnny, explain everything. If it hadn't been five in the morning in Detroit, he could have called Tanith and spilled his guts completely. That would have been easy. Hell, she was probably even awake, but it seemed unfair to Johnny, like he was hiding behind Tanith. It was so easy to let her talk, and it was a good thing that Johnny wouldn't have any patience for that.

Ben's muscles were sore enough that he was in danger of straining something. Johnny probably suspected him of running away. He showered, changed, and headed back to the hotel. The sun was blinding, and it was too warm for late March. At least, it would be too warm in Detroit. That, or he was anxious. It was hard to tell, sometimes, what came from outside. 

He knocked before he opened the hotel room door. The nights in Calgary when he'd snuck over to Johnny's room at night and knocked softly seemed like a long time ago. It felt like time was moving too slowly and too quickly at the same time. 

Johnny didn't answer, but when Ben opened the door, it turned out he'd just fallen asleep with his iPod on again. Johnny had gotten dressed and completed at least part of his intricate grooming routine, and the room was still humid with the smell of his shampoo and cologne. He was wearing a tight black mock turtleneck thing with a zipper, made out of stretchy matte fabric, and it had ridden up in his sleep to reveal an inch of the hair that ran down from his navel and a row of perfectly sculpted abs. His mouth was slightly open. It was hard to look at him and see a man, by any definition of the word that made sense, but he didn't look feminine, either. He looked sweet and peaceful and sexy; he looked like what he was.

Ben leaned over Johnny to kiss his forehead. Johnny stirred. "Oh, you like me again," Johnny yawned.

"You thought I stopped liking you?" Ben said.

"I blow things out of proportion when people leave me alone in the middle of fights."

"It wasn't the middle," Ben said.

"Well, it sure as hell wasn't the end," Johnny said. He sat up, took out his ear buds, ran a hand through his hair. Even his eyelashes looked passive-aggressive.

"What do you want me to say to you?" Ben said.

"Nothing. There's nothing I want you to say. There are things I want you to hear, and not just smile like you do and kiss me so you don't have to think about them."

"Okay." Ben raised up his hands like Johnny had a gun pointed at him. "Fine. Okay."

Johnny took a deep breath, like he'd been rehearsing this speech in his head for the past two hours. "I can't help how I look at you," he said. "Every time I look at you, I think about your dick in me, and I can't not think that. When we go out walking and you sweat a little, I can _smell_ you, and it's all I can do to keep myself from dragging you into an alley and having my way with you. Your knuckles brushed my hand last night when you were grabbing your fortune cookie, and I swear to God, I got hard. It's the best fucking feeling in the world, and thank God for that, because I don't have any control over it. But knowing it makes you uncomfortable, I, the entire time you were gone, I kept thinking of all the women you'd see at the gym or even pass on the street, and I can't give you that. I can't be that."

"Why would you think that?" Ben said. "Why would you think I'd want you to be anything but what you are?"

"You're, I don't know, you're so weird about us being together, and you pretend you're not, and it's just . . . I don't know."

"I'm weird about us being together? Obviously I'm weird about it. It's been a week and a fucking half," Ben said. "I just spent an hour on the Stairmaster trying to figure out what I'm going to say to my dad, who _will_ actually be surprised to hear I have a boyfriend and spend half an hour yelling at me about how I'm going to kill my Catholic grandmother." Johnny started to say something, but Ben talked right over him. "Nothing changes for you. You get to be all excited and happy and whatever. I get to rethink my entire existence."

"That's not what bothers me," Johnny said. "What bothers me is that I don't know. I don't know what's going on with you, and I - I can't - I just want to know what's going on in your head."

"I'll try," Ben said, and he meant it, although he didn't know where he was supposed to start. 

"Okay. I mean, I'm asking a lot of you. I know."

"Seriously," Ben said, "what you're imagining is a lot more interesting than what I'm actually thinking."

"I doubt that," Johnny said.

"No, I mean it. You thought I was going to leave you for some random girl at the gym?"

"I think you're going to leave me for some random girl, period," Johnny said. "I mean, you've been skating for how long, fucking surrounded by gay men, and, like, you didn't _know_?"

"There have always been girls," Ben said. " You should know that any guy who hangs around an ice rink and shows the least signs of heterosexuality has his pick. I've had a girlfriend pretty much constantly since I was in high school. Like, a serious girlfriend. You're only the fourth person I've even slept with." He watched Johnny's jaw drop, and he smiled. "You would have been my first one-night stand, too."

Johnny sat with his knees pulled close to his chest, and he rested his chin in his hands. "Fuck you for knowing how to make me feel special," he said.

"You are ridiculously fucking special," Ben said.

Johnny beamed for the imaginary camera. "I know," he said.

"You pretend you know," Ben said. "But you don't really."

Johnny stretched his long legs out and pointed his toes. It was amazing how he could seem so small sometimes, but when Ben really looked at him, he seemed to go on forever, like his fingers and toes trailed off into space. "I need people to remind me," Johnny said.

"People?" Ben said, leaning over him.

"You," Johnny said. "God damn you." He put his hands where Ben's neck met his shoulders and pulled him downward. Ben fought to keep his balance, one knee between Johnny's legs and one foot on the floor. Johnny kissed aggressively when he was angry: those emotions drew out the boy in him. He could lift Ben; he could hold him down. Ben decided to test that and see where Johnny would take it. He shifted himself forward so his chest was centered under Johnny's hands, so his body would be light. Johnny took the cue, and he rolled Ben over easily, a subtle extension of his shoulder and turning out of the hip. 

Johnny had Ben down on his stomach, which should have been scary or too vulnerable. And it was, in a way, but Johnny deserved that control, deserved to be trusted. It was no problem for Johnny to slide his hands down the front of Ben's jeans and roll them down his legs. He ran those soft, slim, efficient hands back up Ben's thighs to his ass. It made Ben a little nervous that Johnny was spending time in that general area, although he didn't think Johnny was likely to do anything too invasive without permission. He closed his eyes and relaxed his shoulders.

He didn't know quite what he was feeling: cool air and long fingers, and then something warm and wet that had to be Johnny's tongue. Ben's first reaction was revulsion, wondering why anyone would do that on purpose. But that skin was intensely sensitive, and the caress of Johnny's tongue sent pleasure shivering up Ben's back. It was something he wouldn't have known to ask for, but he was getting hard into the mattress, slowly and without urgency, which was something he hadn't realized could be done to him. Like it was one of the few secrets his body had still been keeping from him. 

"You would let me fuck you right now," Johnny said, "wouldn't you?"

"What?" Ben muttered into the pillow.

"You should know I'm not into that," Johnny said. "I've been on top, like, twice ever, and it's just, it's not."

"Not ever?" Ben said, managing to raise his head up a couple of inches.

"Not, like, just not as much."

"Okay," Ben said. "I did wonder."

"Would you have let me, though?" Johnny said.

"There was, like, a minute when I would have let you do pretty much anything to me," Ben said.

"Seriously?"

"Wasn't that where you wanted me?" Ben said.

"I guess. Maybe."

Ben thought of throwing Johnny's "Don't maybe me" back at him, but he wasn't in any position to do that, half-naked and half-hard, lying on his belly. "I just, I need you to stop being jealous of me."

"Sweetie, it's not like I can flip a switch," Johnny said. 

"No, I know, it's just -"

"No, you don't know. You don't realize that you're not only incredibly fucking sexy but one of the sweetest people I have ever met, and I keep, I keep wondering why you would pick me over anyone else."

"Are you kidding?" Ben said. "I'm, like, obsessed with you. I can't even _look_ at anybody else." He rolled over onto his back and sat up, resting his weight back on his hands. It was, now that he said it, difficult to look away from Johnny. It was something they cultivated as skaters, that sense of presence. It made them dangerous to fall in love with. They had the damn spirit of flamenco. 

"It's way too hard not to kiss you right now," Johnny said. "I'm going to take a shot of Listerine."

"I'll go with you," Ben said, meaning it to be a joke.

"You'll go with me. While I gargle."

"I'm going to follow you everywhere," Ben said. "Four month tour, I'll be on that bus every damn night, stealing your Twizzlers and staring at your ass."

"Get your own fucking Twizzlers," Johnny said. He bounced off the bed and pirouetted on his way to the bathroom. It looked like his back was feeling better. And it made Ben sure of something he'd suspected, but that injury had gotten in the way of. It hadn't been until late adolescence that Ben had realized that most people didn't have to work really hard to walk in a straight line, to keep from spinning and leaping and kicking their feet in the air. Johnny knew that impulse to move according to his state of mind, and he knew the anguish of holding it in.

As promised, Ben followed Johnny into the bathroom. He put his hands on Johnny's hips while Johnny washed his mouth out. He waited until Johnny had spit to bite Johnny's neck and make him sigh. He surveyed his situation and realized it would be pretty much effortless to get Johnny out of his pants and bend him over the counter. There was a squeeze bottle of lube on top of the toilet tank from the night before, when they'd had sex in the shower. Ben forced himself to slow down, to not take advantage even though it was Johnny's damn fault for getting him all turned on and then walking away. He ran his hands up Johnny's arms to his shoulders and kissed his neck again. He shifted his weight forward just slightly, enough to bend Johnny forward at the waist a few degrees, to make the suggestion. Johnny said, "Oh, totally," and reached one graceful arm to retrieve the lube.

*

Even though they were going to see each other again in less than a week for Champs on Ice rehearsals, their last day in New York together felt bittersweet. Ben prevailed upon Johnny to stop pouting and go shopping on the Upper West Side, promising that he wouldn't be bored. He brought a book and his iPod, but he showed interest, too. "No, I get it," he said. "The colors and textures and stuff." Then, he spotted an unoccupied sofa, and he left Johnny alone with Barney's and his credit card.

Johnny bought a pair of leather flip-flops, because the weather was springtime-warm, and tight black jeans that would encourage Ben to stare at his ass even more. When Johnny went back upstairs to retrieve Ben, Ben was so engrossed in his book that Johnny had to come up behind him, put his hands on his shoulders, and scare the shit out of him. "Oh," Ben said after he'd recovered from pretending not to freak out. "You bought stuff?"

"Of course I bought stuff. It's Barney's."

"I just, I thought you were going to show me first," Ben said, with the tone of a man who had been dragged along on shopping trips before. Probably by Tanith, with whom Johnny had bonded many times over a shared weakness for shoes. But Ben sounded a little disappointed that he hadn't been consulted.

"Oh, I would have," Johnny said. "But you looked so happy."

"Next time," Ben said. Although he didn't seem offended or even bored, Johnny compensated by taking him downtown to St. Mark's Place and setting him loose among the old records. There weren't any plush armchairs to lie back in, but Johnny found a quiet patch of wall to lean against. Unlike Ben, he hadn't brought anything to occupy himself with, so he put Ben's iPod on shuffle. Ben's book was something about soldiers in outer space, not the kind of thing Johnny would normally touch, but entertaining in a campy epic sort of way. The music was strange, too: blues and the old-fashioned Johnny Cash kind of country, lots of stuff in Spanish, folk-rock growled by guys who couldn't carry a tune. But as Johnny listened, he came to realize that Ben's entire playlist was love songs, happy ones. The music stopped seeming foreign and ugly. It was 30 gigs of Ben's heart.

Three dark, mildew-scented stores later, Ben had a bag of CDs and a "vintage" Nintendo cartridge that he was treating as a sacred artifact. They were hiking up Second Avenue in search of sushi, and Ben had a private smile on his face. A song in his head, Johnny thought. "How fast do you think Marshall's would drop us if they knew I was spending my endorsement check on death metal, my gay boyfriend, and the original NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?"

"Is your publicist trying to scare you again?" Johnny said.

"He's ferrying messages through Tanith now."

"Seriously, compared to any other sport? We're, like, boring," Johnny said. "I mean, compared to, like, football players? We're not, like, getting arrested for snorting cocaine-and-steroid cocktails or crashing our Hummers while raping our groupies."

"Not as a rule," Ben said.

"People freak out about all the gay because it's the only thing they fucking have on us," Johnny said. "I mean, really. What can anyone do? Say something snide in their blog?"

"Not even," Ben said. "Nobody cares about anything but ladies' singles."

"There's also that," Johnny said. They walked for a block or two, pausing at and rejecting a sushi place with a suspiciously faded menu and too many empty tables. Three doors down, another Japanese restaurant was more crowded, and they agreed to wait a few minutes while someone wiped down a table.

"So why not get it over with?" Ben said as they sat down. "Do an interview with _Out Magazine_ or something."

"Some things should just be private, you know?" Johnny said. He would have stopped there, but he could feel Ben getting ready to call bullshit on him. "If it was just purely, hi, I'm gay in theory, that's one thing, but, like, the next question would always be who my boyfriend was, and that's nobody's business. And my family are varying degrees of comfortable, and I -- I don't know. It's just, it's drawing attention to the wrong things. Did you seriously buy death metal?"

Ben laughed under his breath and accepted the change of subject. "I bought this one thing because I liked the name of the band. I don't actually know what it is. I sort of hope it's death metal."

"So you can punish me the next time I steal your iPod?"

Ben shook his head. "Oh, God, if Tanith heard you," he said. "I'm pretty much convinced that the world would be a better place if more people stole my iPod. Which she thinks is arrogant. And I think is just true."

"I knew it. I knew you were secretly arrogant."

"Only about music," Ben said. "And skating. Oh, and Kabuki Quantum Fighter." Johnny decided this was not a smart moment to ask what the hell Kabuki Quantum Fighter was. Ben was totally owning up to his hidden mean streak, and Johnny was helplessly in love with Ben's hidden mean streak. Ben said, "I figure, if I can protect a few people from ever having to hear that fucking James Blunt song ever again--"

"Hey," Johnny said, purposely walking right into it, but also feeling the need to defend himself. "I _like_ that fucking James Blunt song."

"Curses! They got you too!" Ben said, too loudly, as the waiter came to take their order. The waiter almost had time to recover from the inappropriateness before he started to deal with the amount of food and sake they ordered. By the time he'd carded them, recognized at least one name, and figured out what was going on, he looked like he'd been kicked in the face. Johnny would have thought waiters in New York would be more adaptable. Maybe this guy was new.

"I like that you eat sushi," Ben said, humble and apologetic, totally unaware of how much it turned Johnny on when he was snarky. Johnny would have to see to correcting that, although he doubted there was a way to make Ben believe it.

"I like that you _eat_ ," Johnny said. 

"Who doesn't eat?" Ben said.

"It's more that you have a healthy appreciation of pasta and red meat," Johnny said. 

"Oh, God, the carbs thing? Like, people who have no idea how many calories you burn in a day?"

"People who ask where I put it all."

"Because it's not a real sport."

"Exactly," Johnny said.

"So."

"What?"

"So what are we doing?" Ben said.

"Having dinner?"

"No, I mean, after," Ben said. "Like, on tour and stuff. What are we doing?"

"Were you waiting for the momentum to pick up so you could spring this on me?" Johnny said.

"I was just thinking about it," Ben said. "Never mind."

"No, you brought it up, it's here, it's snarling at us, we deal with it."

"Snarling?"

Johnny made a claw with his hand and gave a queer little growl. "Like a tiny, mad puppy," he said.

"Is it bad that you're making me miss my dogs again?" Ben said.

"No, it's bad that you're changing the subject," Johnny said. "Also, I mean, you have a vote in this."

Ben shrugged. "Whatever you want to do," he said. It was both adorable and irritating that he meant it. 

"I vote we spend the whole summer making out in the back of the tour bus," Johnny said. 

"The whole summer?" Ben said. "We'll get hungry."

"There might also be some skating," Johnny said.

"That works for me," Ben said. "I mean, if it --"

"It, yeah. Works," Johnny said.

"Good, because I, um, I -- I like where this is -- I've never had a whole summer with somebody."

Johnny leaned in and whispered, "I've never had a whole two weeks."

"So I'm your first?"

"You're totally my first," Johnny said.

*

There were tourists in the elevator again. Ben and Johnny stood with their backs against the wall while they stopped on every single floor, hands in their pockets, playing a game of looking away from each other, daring the other one to turn his head and smile. Their hotel room, when they reached it, felt like home, with Johnny's shirts hung neatly on the theft-proof hangers and Ben's balled up and piled on top of his suitcase, the ice bucket full of room-temperature water, the slightly sweet smell of KY and pheromone sweat that daily maid service could not eliminate. Ben kicked the door closed behind them and grabbed Johnny's face in his hands. He tasted like pickled ginger, and he was going right for Ben's belt buckle.

Ben's cell phone started ringing. Johnny lifted it out of his pocket and tossed it across the room so it landed in Ben's pile of dirty clothes. He had good aim; of _course_ he had good aim. The phone kept yowling. It was Tanith's ring, that Dave Matthews Band song that she loved and that drove him so crazy that he'd chosen it as a ringtone to motivate himself to answer faster. Not sexy music. Ben wished he could ignore music, push it to the background, not take it apart and feel it in his legs and start compiling moves to it in his mind even when it was insipid. But then, he also wished he could lift Johnny up and glide over the carpeting. It would have saved them the trouble of stumbling towards the bed, tripping over each other and shedding clothes.

The phone rang again. "It's Tanith," Ben said between kisses. "I'll tell her to stop calling."

"No," Johnny said. "I will."

"Holy crap, no you won't," Ben said, trying to tackle him out of the way as they both leapt across the bed, but Johnny was agile and capable of wriggling like a slippery fish. He shook the phone open, said, "Fucking now," and hung up.

"I'm going to be in so much trouble tomorrow," Ben said. He shifted his weight and felt pain shoot down his right side, from his inner thigh to his toes. "Shit," he said.

"Did you pull something?" Johnny teased.

"I think I really did," Ben said. "Right in here. It acts up. Usually I can shake it off if I stretch."

"Oh, God, if I actually gave you a groin injury, I am calling you Michelle _forever_."

"I don't get any say in that, do I?"

"Do you need to stop?" Johnny said. "Should you stretch out?"

"I really don't feel like stretching right now," Ben said.

"Do you want me to go down on you first?" Johnny said. "Or, shit, never mind. You kick when you're --"

"What do you mean, I kick?"

"I mean, I have to hold your fucking legs down when I blow you," Johnny said. He looked, for a few moments, like he was doing arithmetic in his head. "Okay. Lie down on your back."

"You're, like, ten steps ahead of me, there."

"It sucks to go on tour with an injury," Johnny said. "Lie on your back and put your hands behind your head." He was doing that a lot now, just sort of taking over, getting Ben where he wanted him and having his way. He'd stopped being shy about it, as if he'd needed Ben to tell him a certain number of times that it was hot, or even that it was allowed. He would get a wild, strong look about him, not only in his eyes but in the turn of his hip, the extension of his arms. 

Ben raised his eyebrows but lay down. Johnny leapt into furious action, and Ben couldn't complain about being forced to watch him. Despite his insistence that he wasn't going to, he pressed a firm hand into Ben's right knee and circled the tip of Ben's cock with his tongue. Ben bit his lip at the warmth of it. Johnny reached his free arm blindly behind him to grab the KY. It looked like he'd planned to do things more seamlessly, but he had to stop for a second to warm the lube in his hands before he covered Ben's cock with it. They both had that problem: they wanted all the transitions to be clean, but sex didn't always work that way. 

There was no need to rack up the points for technical difficulty, either, but Ben wouldn't have dared to remind Johnny of that. He turned his back to Ben and lowered himself slowly onto Ben's cock, looking over his shoulder and guiding himself with one hand while balancing on the opposite knee. When Ben was deep inside him, he shifted his weight forward, bearing it in his arm and shoulder. That left Ben a little room to buck upward, but not enough that he could injure himself. Ben suspected that he was supposed to close his eyes and let himself be fucked, but he wanted to watch Johnny's back muscles ripple. Virtually immobile, all Ben could use to turn himself on were his eyes and his mind. Fortunately, those were more than enough to work with, and Ben came suddenly, without having felt the rise into it.

"Do you need me to finish you off?" Ben said as Johnny climbed off of him. Sometimes Johnny came from being fucked, and sometimes he didn't; it was impossible for Ben to predict. 

"Yeah," Johnny said. "But don't move." He still had his back to Ben, but Ben could hear the flirtatious smile in his voice. Johnny pirouetted a half-turn on his knees and scooted forward to kneel across Ben's chest. He was being playful, but Ben had figured out that half the time, Johnny did that to distract people from how he was really feeling. It wasn't on purpose: spend enough time practicing your program smile, and you wear it when you don't mean to. Ben just had to learn to see through it and work around it. Johnny was still at an awkward angle, and Ben couldn't quite get his mouth around Johnny's cock. But he did the best he could with his tongue and his lips, and Johnny didn't need all that much assistance. He came with a sigh that was almost feminine, but not exactly. He rolled onto his side, stretched himself out like a cat, and crawled over to rest his head on Ben's chest, his knees tangling with Ben's feet. "Is your flight really early tomorrow?" Johnny said.

"Yeah. It's at, like, 7:30."

"Well, we won't have trouble finding a cab," Johnny said. 

"Is yours early, too?"

"It's, like, an hour after that. But we can ride together," Johnny said. He paused, a listening pause, but Ben was enjoying the warmth of Johnny's body against him, and he didn't want words to get in the way of that. But Johnny got restless during silences. He said, "God, three days are going to seem like forever."

"I think it's going to be one of those things where time moves really fast and really slow at the same time," Ben said.

"Yeah," Johnny said. "Shit, we've still got our skates, it's going to take forever to get through security. We're going to need to get in a cab at, like, four in the morning."

"That's insane."

"That's New York," Johnny said.

"So. We shouldn't sleep?" Ben said.

"So we shouldn't sleep," Johnny said.


	3. Long Program. Free Dance.

Ben had three days in Detroit with Tanith to learn their new program for Champions on Ice. It was a silly program, not very difficult, but after a week off the ice, every step was a little wobbly, a little out of sync. "Stop thinking," Igor kept saying. "These are easy steps. Stop thinking and skate." But Ben wasn't thinking. His head felt totally empty.

They took a break to grab some water, and Tanith came up behind him. "I'm not jealous," she said.

"What?"

"I'm not jealous, and you're not losing me, and whatever else you're thinking. It's not happening." She punched him in the arm hard enough to make him rub it and scowl. "So don't try to make it happen, asshole."

"I'm not. Don't hit me."

"Are you in the middle of an identity crisis, or am I still allowed to remind you how much of a woman you are?" Tanith said.

"I got over that the first time I had to wear tights in public," he said. "You're not jealous?"

"No. I told you. People I like should be with other people I like." She took his water bottle from him and stole a swig. "So was it amazing?"

"It was fun," he said.

"That's it?"

"It was things I'm not going to describe with Igor and Marina and fifteen other skaters here."

She giggled. "So you're going to spend the entire summer snuggling in the back of the tour bus?"

"There might also be some skating." 

"Are you going to teach him that move from _The Cutting Edge_?"

"I thought we agreed we didn't mention that movie," Ben said. "Didn't we institute a fine?"

"No, that was just you. Anyway, you're gay now, we have to watch _Ice Castles_ and cry."

"I'm not -"

"You're not?"

"There yet," he said. "Also, toe pick."

She covered her ears and grimaced. "Okay, you're right, there's a fine."

"Toe pick."

"Don't ever speak to me."

"T -"

"I broke up with Seth," she blurted.

"I -" He wasn't sure whether she was asking for comfort or a bottle of champagne. He didn't mean to think that way - she'd really loved at least one of the guys she'd dated since he'd known her - but she tended to get bored with guys. Theirs was by far the longest committed relationship she'd ever had, and she only let herself have that because there was no sex involved and never would be. They were mutually uninterested. But it still got in the way of dating other people. It wasn't that people were wrong to expect you to give them your whole heart, just that it was impossible.

"No, it was a good breakup," she said.

"It still sucks that it didn't work out," he said.

"No, what sucks is that I wasted four months on a guy who, okay. You and I talked on the phone, what, three times last week? And, like, everything you said about Johnny was a one-word response, but even from _that_ I could tell I wasn't in love enough."

"There were three-word responses," Ben said. He felt sorry for being flippant, but he couldn't keep up with the drama. 

"You're almost cute when you're in love," she said.

"Almost?"

She came up very close to him, like she was about to slap him. "You're not denying it."

"Not so much," he said.

She took a step back, and he exhaled. She said, "Does he know?"

"I don't know if he knows," Ben said.

"He knows," she said. "He totally knows." She finished his water and set the empty bottle down on the bench. "We should run the twizzle sequence again; I'm wobbling," she said. "Come on. Smile like you're in love."

*

Johnny had swiped Tanith's Paris Hilton wig, and that pretty much summed up everything he loved about going on tour. The long acrylic strands flared out when he spun and tangled in his eyes when he checked out. He started tossing off easy triples, salchows and toe loops, because they felt alien under the veil of hair. He had his legs under him again; he had the long extension and curve of his spine. Injured, he wasn't himself. Not being able to bend was like not being able to think. He passed the wig on to Zhenya, on whose head it was almost plausible. It was no trouble to get full extension on his spirals. On his last pass, he got himself into a secure forward outside edge and caught his free blade in his hand. He couldn't quite get his boot over his head yet, but it would be there by Easter. His practice time was almost up, so he did combination spins until he was about to throw up, even managed a donut position like a big fuck you to the limits of his lower back.

As he was putting his skate guards on, Tanith came running up to him in street shoes. "Okay, now I'm missing the wig _and_ the chihuahua," she said.

"The Russians have your hair," Johnny said. "The dog is still at large."

"For fuck's sake," she said, "I don't even have my skates on, and they're -" Someone had put the wig up in a loose bun on top of Zhenya's head. "Would you please? Ben's off looking for Toto, and I don't have time for this."

She finished talking just in time for both of them to watch as Zhenya balled up the wig and tossed it over the boards to Max. "I don't think I have that kind of power," Johnny said.

"Okay," she said. "Tania and Max, I guess I can deal with." She'd been hot and cold like that since rehearsals started. Playful and familiar one minute, cautious and apologetic the next. It wasn't her fault. If he and Ben lasted the summer, Tanith was practically an in-law; if they broke up ugly, she'd take Ben's side forever. Either way, it was strange to see her so much. They'd been Best Friends Forever a couple of summers ago, but life had gotten in the way. There hadn't been a fight, just a drifting apart. And now they had to share a boy.

"It's fine. I'll get it," Johnny said.

"I don't really care as long as it gets back to me before dress rehearsal," Tanith said. "It's the dog I'm worried about. That was custom made."

"It'll come home," Johnny said.

"What did you two _do_ to it last night?" Tanith said, hands on her hips, not making any genuine accusations.

"Are you kidding? If I'd laid a finger on that thing, Ben's head would have spun around. We have boundaries. He doesn't touch my costumes, and I don't touch his."

She studied him, raked her fingers through her hair, shifted her weight. 

"What?" Johnny said, when it was clear she was going to stand there waiting until he made her talk.

"You - you both talk like you've been together for months," she said. "It's been, it's not even been three weeks and you're like - You're so in love, and I totally believe it, but I'm really, when it comes to Ben? I'm, like, neurotic and territorial that he's going to get hurt. Like - like a tiny dog or something."

"Yeah, I know, right?" Johnny said. "It's like - I think maybe it's the long distance thing. The lack of it. Like, when you're used to having a boyfriend you hardly ever see, you -"

"You pack more relationship into less time," Tanith said. She bit her lip. "No, I get it. Sort of. In my mind."

"I guess that's, I mean, you can't really, you can't do better than that," Johnny said, as Ben came running up to them in skates, Toto under his arm like a squishy football.

"I present him to you as I found him," Ben said, clearly suppressing a fit of snickering. He held the costume piece out with both hands. An empty Smirnoff Ice bottle had been tucked into the pouch next to the plush dog. Tanith snatched Toto out of Ben's hands, took the bottle out, and set it on the bench. She stroked the dog's head as if she needed to restore its injured feelings.

"That's so sad," Johnny said. "We've driven your costume to drink."

Ben looked back and forth at Johnny and Tanith. "You're doing that thing," he said. "The thing where you're having a conversation, and you stop as soon as the person it's about is in earshot. Are you planning my future for me? Are you sending me to military school?"

"It's not important," Tanith said. She was huffy, Johnny thought; she shouldn't be huffy.

"We're learning how to share," Johnny said. "We're in new relationship kindergarten." He got a laugh out of Ben and a real smile out of Tanith, and he thought, maybe it could be easy. Maybe she would let him understand. The only person he had ever been anywhere near that close with was his mom, and his mom had a pretty clear sense of where her territory ended and his boyfriends' began. Johnny would have thought that by now, Tanith would have a similar sense of boundaries. In fact, she probably did. He imagined that she just didn't know whether they still applied. He was a guy, and her friend, and he wasn't sure which of those was a bigger problem.

"Shit," Tanith said. "The Zamboni's leaving. I have to go find my skates." She put her hand on Johnny's shoulder. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have - I don't want you to think I'm like that. I'm really not like that."

"You're allowed to be like that," Johnny said.

She kissed his cheek, and he couldn't help beaming a little. "Until I get over it," she said, heading towards the women's locker room.

"Do I get to ask what was going on there?" Ben said when she was gone.

"My mom's going to tour with us for a couple of weeks in June," Johnny said. "Ask me again after that."

"So I don't get to ask," Ben said.

"I don't think you do," Johnny said.

"I don't think I do, either," Ben said. He leaned as close to Johnny as he could without attracting the attention of the skeevy Tampa journalist who had been following them around all during their week of practice. "Are you sticking around?"

"I think I'm going to take a shower and get some food, and then my physical therapist _finally_ cleared my back so I can start doing Pilates again. So, like, I have my afternoon, but yeah, later."

"You're so focused," Ben said. "You're so much more fucking focused than I am."

"Tell it to America," Johnny said. He backed away, blew a kiss, spun on his guarded toe pick and wobbled. When he'd been in pain, it had been so hard to even get on the ice. Now that he was healthy again, he remembered how much harder walking was than skating. Walking was slow; stopping was built into it. He looked back at Ben, who had his heel propped up on the boards at a 90-degree angle to his body and was lowering himself into a stretch over his leg. Ben looked simultaneously powerful and capable of floating. Johnny wished that their relationship could be that effortless, or at least give the illusion. Instead, there were all these awkward moments, these intrusions from the outside that made him stop and struggle. It was so much easier to glide. But you couldn't do that in street shoes.

*

Going on tour was surreal. New rink every day, programs so new at the beginning of the summer that you hardly remembered them and so worn out by July that you'd surrender a testicle to skate to some new music, floodlights and encores and costumers who thought it was hilarious to dress Ben in pink sequined Lycra. And then you flew home every Sunday night to start learning your competition programs, so that you could forget them all over again on Friday to put on your Sean Connery wig and remember when you thought this concept was funny. Summers were long in figure skating like winters were long in Michigan. The money was too good to turn down, as was the opportunity for free cross-country travel, but it was all schmaltz and no glory. It was the only time of year when Ben had to force his smiles.

Part of it was that Ben associated touring with missing people. His family had moved to Detroit for him, and they still lost him for half the year. Tanith said it was a sign of his deteriorating mind that he got grumpy when he didn't see his dogs for a while, but in the absence of any other children, they were his babies. He paid some of the local rink rats to take care of them, and they knew not to giggle audibly when he asked them to put the dogs on the phone. Johnny, at least, thought this was perfectly normal, so much so that he insisted that he get to say hi to them, too. "If they disapprove of me, we're both in trouble," he said.

The dogs didn't seem to have any objections, and Johnny assured him with near-seriousness that his puppies approved, too. "You realize that you could fit, like, seven of your dogs in each of mine," Ben said.

"I think they'd get along," Johnny said. "It would be like the Brady Bunch."

They both got quiet for a minute, and Ben guessed that they were both figuring out the same thing. If this worked out, it would be years before they could have any kind of life together. They trained in different parts of the country. Johnny had already relocated his family once, and even if Ben could convince Tanith to leave Detroit, he'd never get Igor and Marina out of Michigan. Skating had to come first as long as they were both competing. They didn't have to discuss that to know they agreed on it.

"Shit," Johnny said. "The bus leaves in half an hour, and my stuff is all over the place." It really wasn't. They didn't have a whole lot of time to unpack, especially with their secret mission of having sex in as many American cities as possible. 

"Like they're going to leave without us," Ben said.

"We're going to get stuck on the Quiet Bus," Johnny said. This year, Champs on Ice had sprung for two tour buses. Someone had noticed that twenty skaters plus equipment, luggage, the revolving door of coaches and family members, and Tanith's shoe collection were too much for one bus to carry. One bus had been set aside for those who preferred to sleep while on the road, and Tanith and Evan had quickly pronounced the other the Diva Bus. The joke had caught on so thoroughly that they'd come back after their second Boston show to find that an unidentified conspiracy of coaches had put up streamers, tinsel, and shiny paper cutout letters that announced the bus's name to all who entered. 

It made sense that Johnny was a fireball of neuroses. They were headed to Detroit for a Sunday matinee, and Johnny had agreed to stay there with Ben for the week. Ben had reserved extra ice time so Johnny could practice, and he'd warned his friends to clear their schedules. He wasn't sure what they'd make of Johnny, but some of them had started to get noisy about not having met him yet. 

Ben slung his gym bag, his backpack for the bus, and his garment bag full of costumes over his shoulder and dragged his suitcase behind him. "I'll see you downstairs," he said.

"You're leaving me all alone?"

"I have to check out of my room that I never even saw," Ben said. "Besides, I don't want to get stuck on the Quiet Bus." In previous summers, he might not have minded the Quiet Bus. Zoning out to music and reading were activities he enjoyed. But one of the other things you weren't allowed to do on the Quiet Bus was put your arm around your boyfriend. Apparently, that made some people uncomfortable. Those people remained anonymous, because he and Johnny had both been informed of the rule through their coaches. 

Ben had trouble understanding how you could get this far in the skating world and hang onto your homophobia. When he'd thought of himself as straight, he'd often felt like the only heterosexual for miles around. His publicist was gay; he'd had gay coaches; most of the tiny minority of male skaters at the rink where he'd skated as a kid had come out within moments of hitting puberty. He'd assumed he was straight for so long because most of the men he'd had to compare himself to were gay. And it wasn't like people were so accepting or supportive of the middle ground. With hindsight on his side, he knew he'd fallen prey to that himself: every girl who caught his eye was proof that he was straight, while every boy was an exception, something that he'd grow out of. Most of the men he was attracted to were androgynous and effeminate, like Johnny, and he'd used that excuse, too. He'd just assumed that everyone had to make those kinds of excuses. He'd convinced himself that guys who said they'd never had a gay thought were possibly lucky but probably lying.

He shoved his luggage into the bowels of the Diva Bus, which was already idling in the loading zone, and went back inside the hotel to grab some orange juice and a muffin from the hospitality room. "There's, like, actually enough baked goods today," Kimmie told him as he went in. He got that almost every morning: his grumbling about offensive free breakfast spreads had once been the entire extent of his bad boy image. He was glad to see her joining in on the inside jokes and the silliness. For the first few weeks, she'd been nervous, but after the Columbus show, she'd snuck away from her coach's watchful eye and let Johnny and the Russians conspire to get her drunk for the first time in her life. After that, it was like she'd made an overnight transformation into everyone's slightly depraved little sister.

"Sweet," Ben said. The hospitality room was nearly empty. People liked sleeping late. Even Tanith, who he could usually find with her feet on a corner table, face buried in the hood of her Pistons sweatshirt like a Jawa while she drank her coffee, hadn't dragged herself downstairs yet. She'd been talking about picking up random guys once they hit the Midwest. He'd thought she'd been joking, but now he wasn't so sure. He kind of hoped she'd scored.

He carried his breakfast back to the bus. There was a row of seats near the back that was informally reserved for him and Johnny. The idea was, if they sat in the back, nobody had to witness the PDA unless they wanted to. He put on his music and leaned back to sip his juice and pick at his muffin. Most of the time, he chose being with Johnny over being alone, but he missed his privacy once in a while. 

It occurred to him that he might be a little hung over. The alcohol always flowed pretty freely on tour, because there was no other way to get through the month of June, but the two buses thing had amplified the situation. They carried their stashes in ice-filled picnic coolers. Most of the other skaters favored vodka or hard lemonade. Johnny kept a bottle of Stoli Vanil and a quart of chocolate milk in his so that he would have his booze to himself. The only reason Ben wasn't lugging one around was that he and Tanith shared their Jack Daniels and Diet Coke, and she'd stopped allowing him to be responsible for it when he'd accidentally left it behind in New Jersey. 

He fell asleep. He hadn't expected to: he'd felt alert enough getting on the bus. But that was Kimmie shaking him awake, which meant he'd needed waking. "There's a press thing," she said. "The Champs people are busy knocking on doors, so they sent me to come get you." 

"Press?" Ben yawned. "They couldn't have done it last night?"

"It's some local thing," Kimmie said. "Like, Girl Scouts or something."

"All this for five minutes and a picture? Jesus." He left his backpack and his half-eaten muffin on the bus and followed Kimmie back to the hospitality room.

There weren't any Girl Scouts there, just a bunch of annoyed skaters in sweats and flip-flops and one glossy-haired woman in a pink suit and matching pink pumps. Tanith intercepted Ben as he came in, saying, "Don't sit near Johnny."

"What?" he said.

"I think it's some kind of USFSA thing," Tanith said. "Michelle heard they're freaking out about -- I don't know, sit over here with me and look wholesome."

Ben made eye contact with Johnny and smiled defeatedly at him. Johnny smiled back but shook his head, a gesture of warning. He seemed to realize as much as Ben did that Ben's decision to leave early had spared them a lot of drama.

"It's only the US skaters," Tanith said. "Look."

Ben was about to say something snide about blind patriotism, but the woman in the pink suit banged a fork against an empty chair to get their attention. "Good morning," she read from a clipboard. She looked perplexed when nobody greeted her back. "Thank you all for meeting with me. My name is Lou Ann Hogenkamp, and I'm the Assistant Director of Outreach Services for USFSA. I've asked that the buses be held until we're finished here. I assure you that you'll arrive in Detroit with plenty of time to warm up before your performance this afternoon. The reason I've asked to meet with you this morning is, there have been some reports of inappropriate behavior among the skaters on this tour. We at USFSA want to remind you that the people in this room represent the very best that American figure skating has to offer. You're the cream of the crop, and we're proud to count you among our members. 

"However, what you all need to remember is, athletes at your level of accomplishment are more than just private individuals. You're representatives of USFSA, and more importantly, you're role models for the skaters of the future. So when we hear reports of underage drinking, drug use, promiscuous sex and, uh, homosexual activity among our top athletes, we have to express our concern. We hope that in the future, you'll take some time to think about how your actions reflect on you and on the figure skating community. We've brought you all together because we don't want to single anyone out. We want you _all_ to understand that underage drinking is illegal and unacceptable under any circumstances. We want you all to think about how pictures on the internet of two male skaters holding hands will affect little boys just starting out in the sport. We--"

"That skating might be a chance for them to participate in sports without getting beat up for being different?" It was Sasha. Ben hadn't believed anyone would have the balls to interrupt a USFSA official in the middle of a morality lecture. Sasha was, maybe, the only person who could get away with it. She sipped water at the hotel room parties while everyone else drank, and her worst vice was playing Texas Hold 'Em with Uno cards with whoever she could drag to the front of the Diva Bus, using Skittles as poker chips. She had nothing to lose. "Oh my God," she said. "This is so ridiculous."

"Also?" Evan said. "Nobody's doing drugs."

"Excuse me?" Lou Ann Hogenkamp said.

"This is ridiculous, and nobody's doing drugs," Evan said. "It was one joke at one press conference, which the person apologized for. And I mean, the drinking is a problem, and we should all keep an eye on that. But nobody's doing drugs."

While Lou Ann sputtered, Tanith raised her hand. "Which male skaters are holding hands on the internet?"

Lou Ann scowled so hard it looked like her makeup was going to smear. "You know perfectly well who I'm talking about."

"Do you know where we can find the pictures?" Tanith said.

"I wasn't given that information, no."

"That's too bad," Tanith said. "Our website guy likes it when we give him candids."

"You all need to take this more seriously," Lou Ann said. "If you don't behave in a manner consistent with USFSA's mission statement, there can be repercussions."

Ben couldn't hold it in anymore. "Like what? You're going to take us _all_ out of the brochure?"

The silence was heavy like being dropped. He knew he should have let someone else say it. After all, it was possible that Johnny's exclusion from USFSA's 2006 promotional materials had been a reflection of his poor performances at the Olympics and at Worlds. But nobody quite believed that. This was the outburst that Ben would have made anyway: it was unfair and offensive, and it would have been more criminal to leave it unsaid.

Just as it started to look like a stalemate, Michelle spoke up. "Lou Ann, I think we all understand USFSA's concerns, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that we're all committed to representing our country and our sport in as positive a light as we possibly can. But the accusations seem to be wildly out of proportion to reality. There's been some drinking on tour, but it's been moderate from what I can tell, and the underage skaters have been staying away for the most part. There hasn't been any drug use or sleeping around that I know about. And there have always been gay men in this sport. Nobody denies that. As far as I know, there is one gay relationship between skaters on this tour, and they've been discreet and respectful in the way they've handled it. It doesn't sound like those pictures were posted on the internet with those skaters' knowledge or consent, and it doesn't sound like they'd be easy for young skaters to find. I think we could all stand to be more conscientious about our actions and how they reflect on the organizations we're affiliated with, but seriously? I don't think the situation warrants delaying our buses."

Lou Ann looked down at her clipboard, then up at Michelle, then down at her clipboard again. "I'll... have to talk to my superiors about this," she said. As she hurried out the door, she added, "Have a good show tonight."

They all stood up slowly. Something small but meaningful, half a smile or most of a nod, seemed to travel around the room. Together, they filed out and headed for the buses.

"So," Ben whispered to Tanith as they walked down the hallway. "Was there any promiscuous sex that Michelle doesn't know about?"

She shrugged. "He was nice," she said. "He didn't know who I was."

"Was it what you needed?" Ben said.

"I don't know," she said. "But I'm a fucking adult, you know? Sometimes I can have things because I want them."

"We're not adults," Ben said. "We're role models."

"Fuck that," Tanith said. "Go play with your boyfriend."

It wasn't so much that he was obeying her, as it was what he'd planned on doing anyway. Johnny had already commandeered the remains of his muffin. "I get to eat this because I almost sat on it," he said with his mouth full.

"There are pictures of us on the internet," Ben said, sitting down.

"There are lots of pictures of us on the internet," Johnny said. "Some of mine are topless."

"No, I mean, there are pictures of _us_. Being . . . us."

"Of course there are pictures of us. We were holding hands in Chelsea in broad daylight," Johnny said. "They're probably on that website with the sports gossip. They have a whole section for gay athletes." He grinned for the imaginary flashbulbs. "They like me there."

"So you don't care?" Ben said.

"Not really. Do you?"

"I don't know," Ben said. "I feel like I should."

"Well, stop it," Johnny said. "Have some muffin."

"Oh my God, there is no way to express how much I do not want your already-chewed muffin."

"No, I was going to give you some actual muffin, but -" Johnny swallowed audibly and sat across Ben's lap. "The word 'muffin' sounds really dirty when you say it over and over." He parted Ben's lips with his tongue. 

After a very small amount of time, something soft but aerodynamic bounced off the side of Ben's head. "That's not church tongue," Sasha yelled. "Get a room." Johnny sighed melodramatically and climbed back into his own seat. They might have been relieved of the responsibility of pretending to be examples of virtue, but there were still rules against porno tongue while the bus was in motion. Limits were comforting, when you could find them.

*

"I want nachos," Johnny said, as the lights went up for intermission, the audience herded out for refreshments, and the PA cued up the Zamboni song.

"Do you even like nachos?" Ben said.

"Not really. But I want them. Stale ones, smothered in Velveeta. Mild Velveeta. Maybe topped with ground beef."

"Who are you?" Ben said.

"And maybe a Bud Light."

"No, seriously," Ben said. "Who _are_ you?"

"A man who's been on tour way too long," Johnny said.

"You know what I could use?" Ben said.

"What?"

"A Zamboni. Actually, a Zamboni powered by ponies. A Zampony."

"Wouldn't they leave divots?" Johnny said. "The ponies."

"You'd put little skates on them. Sad little pony skates."

"That's so mean," Johnny said. "I'm telling everyone you're mean to ponies. Hey, Evan! Ben's mean to ponies."

"Didn't I beg you not to involve me in this stuff?" Evan said.

"If you don't want to get caught up in the pony jokes, you should probably stay out of earshot," Ben said. "I'm checking my messages." He was waiting to hear from his mom; there was something about one of his brothers moving or moving in with somebody. Johnny was ashamed that he hadn't really been paying attention when Ben had told him about it. Ben's mom was pretty much guaranteed to call in the middle of performances: she had no sense of time zones. Ben was playing with his phone, pushing buttons and frowning.

"Did you hear anything?" Johnny said.

"No,"; Ben said. "I mean, not from my mom. I'll tell you later." He tilted his head towards Evan and clicked his tongue. Once the second act of the show started, they'd be able to wander off quietly somewhere, as long as they watched their time. During intermission, fans sometimes figured out how to sneak backstage, and it was best to hide. So they waited until the "no laser pointers" announcement blared from the PA, and then they snuck to the men's room, where Ben locked them into the handicapped stall. "It was from my ex," he said. "Which is why, you know. I didn't want to say anything."

"Okay," Johnny said slowly.

"She left this text message that was all, like, when are you coming home, I want to see you, and I think, like, maybe she thinks -- I don't know. Like she thinks we might get back together or something."

Johnny folded his arms and stood with his back against the tile. Chin up, perfect posture: his fight face. He hadn't known that was what it was until he'd gotten together with Ben. "Is she right?" he said.

"I don't think so," Ben said.

"So you're not _sure_."

"No, I mean, we've taken, like, breaks before," Ben said. "I think maybe she thinks that's all this is. Like, it sounded pretty final to _me_ when I asked her to marry me and she said no, but -"

Johnny softened his stance, stepped forward, and put a hand on Ben's arm. "I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know it was that serious."

"You didn't know I needed the rebound that badly?" Ben said with a laugh, but Johnny didn't return it. "Seven years," Ben said. "Seven fucking years."

"I'm - I don't know. I'm sorry? What do you want me to say?" Johnny said. 

"I don't know," Ben said.

"Because, I mean, I've been asking you all along what's going on with you, what happened with her, and you just kept going, it's over, it's nothing. And this whole time I have been so _fucking_ honest with you, and you've just been - I mean, you asked her to marry you. You didn't think that was important enough to tell me?"

"What? No," Ben said. "It was, like, it was too important."

That made sense. At least, it made sense for Ben, the way his mind worked. And maybe it was that, realizing that he did know Ben's mind a little, that let Johnny retreat and relax, his hands release, his breath come back slow and full. "So tell me," Johnny said. "Tell me now."

"I don't know," Ben said. "We'd been together, like, almost seven years, and I always thought, like, when we're old enough, we'll get married. Like, after a while, we just assumed it, right? And then I turned 24 and I realized, wait, my parents were younger than me when they got married. So I bought a ring, and then I put it off until after the Olympics, and I finally propose, and it's just really simple? Like, I just took her out to dinner. And she seemed, I don't know, like she expected me to have done something really complicated and theatrical, but it's like, she was the only part of my life that wasn't like that. So she looks at me, and she looks at the ring, and she says, 'I will, but only if you promise to put me first.' And all I can think is, she wants me to put her before skating, before my career, before Tanith? I don't say that, obviously, but I hesitated, you know? She should have known I couldn't promise that. And, like, I think she did know, because she got up and she said, 'You know what? Never mind,' and she left. And I kept - I kept thinking, like, I should call her. But it was right before Worlds and we were training like crazy, and it was like, what am I going to tell her? So I didn't, and I just, we went to Calgary and you took me out for Chinese food, and I didn't hear from her and I figured she'd moved on, too."

There was no place to cut in on Ben, no way for Johnny to do anything but stand with his hands behind his back and nod. He didn't ever want to get in the way of Ben on the rare occasion that he opened up. "Thank you," he said.

"Um, you're welcome?"

"No, I mean, thank you for telling me," Johnny said. "Like, you could have told me before. It would have been all right. But thank you for telling me when I asked you to."

"It wouldn't have been all right," Ben said. "You would have been careful with me, you would have slowed things down, you - you would have realized that I'm not worth it to you."

"It, um? It sounds like it wasn't your fault," Johnny said.

"It sounds that way?" Ben said. "Okay, I guess maybe -- okay. You know how I told you you're, like, fourth?"

That threw Johnny for a second, but he figured it out and giggled and said, "Yeah."

"Well, like, Merrie was first, right? And the other two were... kind of during."

"Oh," Johnny said flatly. "Oh."

"Like, one of them was during an official hiatus, so it was . . . I assumed it was okay. And the other one was, um -"

"Unofficial hiatus?" Johnny said.

"Yeah," Ben said. "Like, she knows now, but . . . yeah."

"That doesn't mean anything," Johnny said, not really believing it. "That doesn't mean you'll do that to me."

"I don't know," Ben said. "Like, there are times when I look at you, when I'm with you, and I think, okay, Tanith and I have two more Olympics left in us, you have at least one, and that's, that's a huge amount of time. But even so, I can see us in that apartment in New York that you talk about, and dogs running around and you designing clothes and me, I don't know, we'll see if the voice work takes off, but I can see it. I can see us adopting kids, I can see us having a life, and I think, what if I can't do that? What if I'm, like, I'm just not good enough of a person to deserve that?"

Johnny wanted to reassure him, but he decided honesty was better. And maybe more reassuring, after all. "I don't know if you are," he said. "I mean, I think you are. I'm taking my chances on that."

"I'm taking my chances on the fact that if I cheated on you, you'd rip my throat out," Ben said.

Johnny shook his head. "I wouldn't. I'd let you."

"No."

"I would let you," Johnny said. "And I'd hate myself, and I'd hate you, but - but I know myself, and I'd let you. I'd think I deserved it somehow. "

"I'm starting to think we just have the same bad relationships over and over," Ben said. "Like, no matter how different you think the person is, you just find new people with the same faults and do the same shitty things with them."

"Sweetie, you've been in one whole relationship," Johnny said. 

"Maybe."

"Seriously."

"You know what the weird thing is?" Ben said.

"Could you narrow it down?" Johnny said.

"Merrie and I were together for seven years, right? And all that time, we never had a fight. Not an actual, like, fight. When she was mad at me, she would just leave the room, she'd just go home. But you and me, we've been together for like two months, and I can think of, what? Three or four? A bunch."

"Do the ones that weren't about anything count?" Johnny said.

"We, like, we didn't even have those," Ben said. "And you - you drive me crazy, you wear me out, but it's good."

"It's like endorphins," Johnny said. "When you train too hard and everything hurts, but you know you taught yourself something and now you own it." 

Ben looked at Johnny like he had something to say, but what he had to say was a kiss, lips closed but long, as if it were suspended in the air. Johnny held Ben's face in his hands and ran his fingers up into Ben's hair. He didn't want to have sex now, in a bathroom in the bowels of the Colonial Center, but kissing was soft and safe. It fooled you into believing in Central Park West apartments and children and puppies and futures. Johnny wanted to be fooled; he wanted to be convinced. He eased into the almost-truth of Ben's lips, his eyes and his feet heavy.

"I'll call her after the show," Ben said, still kissing. "I'll explain." 

That was all either of them said until Evan came pounding on the stall door to tell them they had ten minutes to get dressed for the finale.

*

Ben hadn't planned on returning Merrie's call. She'd only texted him the once, and he'd assumed that she would hear his silence loud and clear. Tanith waited until they were back in Detroit for two long weeks of training to tell him that Merrie had called her three times, asking why he wouldn't talk to her. "I can't blow her off anymore," Tanith said.

"I don't want to talk to her," Ben said. "She dumped me. It's done. I don't have anything left to say."

"Well, it looks like she doesn't agree with you," Tanith said.

"Seriously. What does she think is going to happen?"

"I don't know," Tanith said. "I never understood her that well." She rubbed his back in circles under his shoulder blades. "Come on," she said. "You know whose side I'm on."

"If you're on my side, why can't you just keep stalling her until she figures it out?" he said.

"Who said I was on _your_ side?" she said. "I'm just trying to protect Johnny from your jealous ex." 

"Oh, he could totally take her," Ben said.

"You think?"

"He's pretty fucking ripped," Ben said.

"You would know."

"So you're on _his_ side?" Ben said.

"Why wouldn't I be?" Tanith said.

"I don't know," Ben said. "He told me you were being weird with him."

" _Weird_ with him? Weird how?"

"I don't know. He said you were, like, huffy or something."

"I was what?" Tanith said. "I wasn't -- okay. I think this is just Johnny, thinking people are out to get him. Because I'm, I was a little skeptical when you came back from New York and you'd all but moved in together, but you make each other so happy I could throw up. And you skate a lot better when you're happy, and Johnny -- when he's happy, that's a really good thing, trust me."

"Wow," Ben said. "You really _are_ on his side."

"He's my friend, too," Tanith said. "I think sometimes you forget that."

"I think sometimes _he_ forgets that," Ben said. He let that sink in, and she didn't say anything. Not every failure of communication was his fault. He said, "I should go. To Merrie's. I mean, I'm sure she's home."

"Go. Go!" Tanith said. "I'll . . . distract your boyfriend for you."

He got in his car. She was new, a silver Subaru Forester, a present to himself for Olympic silver. He'd named her Bella, because she was his beautiful Italian girl. He'd spent so much time away from her that she still smelled like dealership and treated leather. His body still knew the drive from Tanith's house to Merrie's, and he let himself daydream and sing along to the stereo. He realized that he was wearing all of these things that Johnny had given him: a dark red shirt that Johnny had bought him in Boston, a pair of ostentatious bug-eyed sunglasses that he'd borrowed a few days earlier and forgotten to give back before he'd gotten on the plane. He realized that he was paying attention to what he was wearing. It should have been clear to anyone who he belonged to.

Merrie was slow getting to the door, like always, and Ben found himself shifting his weight and gritting his teeth. "Oh," she said when she opened the door, like he'd knocked the wind out of her.

"Tanith is not your damn messenger," was the first thing he said to her. He shocked himself with the rage in his voice.

"Sorry," she said. "You didn't call back. I was worried."

"I thought maybe you'd figure out that I was done," he said, "and we wouldn't have to go through all this."

"Through all what?" Merrie said, letting him in. 

"Through this thing where I have to come over to your house and explain to your face that, okay, I don't even know what I'm explaining," he said. "But I'm here. So why don't you tell me?"

"I don't know," she said. "It's been a couple of months, right? I was just wondering how you were."

Tanith's words were still ringing in his mind. "I'm good, " he said. "I'm happy."

"Good," she said. "Me too. I mean, I've had some time to think about stuff."

"And what are you thinking?" he said.

"I'm thinking . . . I'm thinking maybe I said the wrong thing to you," she said.

"Okay," he said.

"I mean, you obviously gave it some thought, and -"

"No," he said.

"I'm sorry?" she said. 

"I have a fucking _boyfriend_ , Merrie," he said. 

"So?" she said.

"So you're a little late," he said.

"It's the same length as most of our breaks have been," she said.

"This wasn't a 'break,'" Ben said. "This was me asking you to marry me and you turning me down. That feels pretty fucking final to me, if you don't see us having a future."

She stared at him, obviously perplexed, like she hadn't realized that he was capable of raising his voice. 

"You don't see us having a future, do you?" he said softly.

"I don't know," she said. "I mean, all this time, I've been waiting for you to turn into - to turn into someone I could marry, and I just don't think that's happened yet. You're still - it's like you refuse to grow up, to calm down, to take responsibility. That thing you do where you've got some new obsession every six months? It was cute when you were seventeen. It's not so cute now. You need to settle down, Ben. You need to sit still. And I can't be your wife until you do that."

"You _know_ ," he said. "You _know_ it's going to be a long time before I can do that."

"It doesn't have to be," she said.

"Yes, it does," he said, and in that, he knew what he was really saying. He was sorry that he was more talented than she was. He was sorry that he was in his mid-twenties and not only still skating but winning competitions and making tons of money for it. That hadn't been the plan when they'd gotten together. He'd just started skating with Tanith then, and he'd known it was good, known it was working, but he hadn't known how good. He had expected to go to college and skate a little on the side; he'd expected to have a normal life. But he and Tanith kept on getting better, and they kept on winning. The longer that kept happening, the more alien the idea of a normal life seemed. He knew that glory was addictive and dangerous, and he knew that his would fade. For most of their relationship, she'd been careful not to hold him back. He didn't believe that she wanted him to quit, to throw it all away for her sake. But she wished she could want to, and that wasn't something he could ever live with, not even after he retired. 

"No," she said. "You just don't want to."

"Of course I don't want to!" he said. "Why would I want to? Yeah, I get passionate about things, and that comes and goes. But in my life, there have been two things I have stayed passionate about no matter what else has been going on: skating and you. And when you told me I couldn't have both of those things at the same time, not to the degree I wanted them, I - you forced me to make a decision. And I, I think you knew which decision I was going to make."

"I had hoped," she said. "I had hoped you'd be willing to compromise a little. To be an adult about it."

"How am I not being an adult?" he said. "I mean, I'm trying to be. I looked at where we were, and I thought, let's make it honest. Let's make it official. I meant it when I said I wanted to marry you, and I was ready to rearrange my life a little, but I wasn't ready to - to -"

"To grow up," she said. "To acknowledge that there are sacrifices you need to make, that everything isn't just fun and exciting and new all the time, and -"

"But everything _is_ ," he said. "It is to me. And I don't - I don't think you should hang around waiting for me to grow out of that. Because, I mean, look at me. I don't even look like the same person you started dating seven years ago. And I think maybe you were expecting me to turn into a certain kind of person, and I didn't do that, and maybe because of that, I can't be right for you."

"But you can be right for Johnny fucking Weir?" she said.

"I don't know," he said. "How did you -"

"Did you, like, forget that your friends are also my friends?" she said.

"Sort of," he said.

"Please," she said. "Please just tell me that you didn't leave me because you were gay all this time and you didn't know how to tell me."

"You left _me_ ," he said. She gnawed her lip, the goddess of eternal patience. He thought this should have been the thing to freak her out: it was the nightmare of every girl who tried to date a male skater. But her temper stayed even, like she was looking at him from far away, like this whole conversation was already a memory. He said, "I wasn't gay. I'm not gay. I mean, I'm not straight either, I'm, I don't know, the fact that I'm in love with him doesn't erase the fact that I was in love with you, but it also doesn't mean, like, it doesn't mean this is new."

She backed away from him like he was contagious. "So, like, the entire time we were together you were, like, secretly lusting after guys, and you didn't tell me?"

"Because it didn't _matter_ ," he said.

"You're _kidding_ me," she said.

"Seriously," he said. "The whole Orlando Bloom thing? The summer I spent hatching plans to pick up Jeff Buttle? It never even occurred to you?"

"It's impossible to tell when you're serious," she said. "Is the thing."

"Okay," he said. "This is me being serious. I'm serious that I'm sorry. I'm serious that I loved you. I'm serious that it's over, and I'm sad about that, and I -- I don't know what else there is to say."

She folded her arms and studied him. She was standing too far away for him to reach. When he and Johnny fought, they were always close enough to touch each other, like they were making sure that they could quit fighting and start making out if they needed to. Merrie, when she was angry, always had to be in another time zone. It made him wonder which one was really the long distance relationship. 

"Got it," she said flatly.

"Okay," he said. He hesitated for just a moment before he left, and he was on the phone with Johnny before he'd even started the car. "I miss you," he said when Johnny answered.

"I miss you too," Johnny said. He sounded rushed and secretive.

"Oh, shit, did I call while you were training?" Ben said.

"Yeah, but I was about to take a break, and Priscilla heard the boyfriend ringtone and commanded me to go answer it," Johnny said.

"I have my own ringtone?" Ben said. "You really do like me."

"You've been salsa music for weeks," Johnny said.

"I've been salsa music all my life," Ben said. He waited a beat before he added, "Your coach knows my ringtone?"

"It's not that hard to figure out, sweetie," Johnny said. 

"Do I call too much?" Ben said. "Sorry."

"Are you kidding? I spend, like, every second hoping you'll call."

"Then it's a good thing I call, like, every second."

"I'm serious. I'll be skating on ESPN and Dick Button will be like, 'All of a sudden, every time he's on the ice, it's like he's waiting for a phone call from Detroit,'" Johnny said.

"'I keep trying to slip him drugs, but I can't, because he's always on the phone.'"

"Oh my God, don't do your Dick Button voice over the phone, it's way too accurate," Johnny said.

"Sorry."

"So what are you wearing?" Johnny said, with enough irony in his voice to own the cliché.

"Jesus, I'm driving," Ben said.

"Damn you, I've been thinking all day about everything I want to do to your dick, and you're in the fucking car? That's so unfair."

Ben's cock stirred a little with anticipation, knowing that he was going to get to hear what Johnny had been thinking. "Relax, I'm two minutes away," Ben said. "So what are you working on? Skating-wise?"

"I'm trying to get a quad toe-triple loop combination together," Johnny said. "I've been two-footing the loop a lot even when I manage to finish the rotation on the quad, but I landed a couple of clean ones. You?"

"Two hours of Golden Waltz, an hour and a half of tango footwork," Ben said.

"And you didn't, like, slit your wrists?"

"Hey, I'm still trying to figure out how a person can spend a whole morning doing quad toe loops and not switch to golf."

"So why is it the _Golden_ Waltz?" Johnny said.

"I think it's so you can tell it apart from, like, the Ravensburger Waltz and the Starlight Waltz."

"There's a difference?"

"You know, I could actually tell you," Ben said.

"Are you fucking _home_ yet?"

"I'm, like, pulling into my driveway," Ben said. "Aren't you in public?"

"I'm in the men's room at an ice rink," Johnny said. "Believe me, I'm alone."

Ben parked his car, ran into his house, and locked himself in his room. He lived alone, but that didn't make it any less embarrassing when the dogs barged in. "I'm home," he said. "What are you wearing?"

Ben loved that he could hear when Johnny was smiling. Not only that, he could hear which smile it was. This was the flirty smile, with a touch of the "I'm talking about something I love" smile. Ben thought Johnny's facial expressions should have ISU-appointed names: the Golden Smile, the Ravensburger Smile, the Starlight Smile. Johnny said, "The red zip-up with CCCP on it and black warmups. New ones that aren't gross yet. You?"

Ben lay back on his bed and stuck his hand down his pants. "The shirt you bought me," he said. "So what was it you were going to do to my dick?"

"There were a few things," Johnny said. Ben could hear his eyes half-lidding, his lips transitioning into the "about to give an amazing blow job" smile. "Like, I've been thinking about wanting to kiss you, getting my tongue really deep in your mouth and, like, the way it feels like you're going to swallow me up. And now that you're _distracted_ , I'm going to run my fingertips down your chest. I'll stop at your fly like I'm going to unzip you, but I won't. I'll put my hand on your dick and let you grind into me, and I'll find the head with my thumb and draw circles around it, really slow. And you're still kissing me, kissing me really fucking hard, and you're getting so fucking hard in my hand, but you're being really patient, because that's how you are." 

In real life, Ben was way ahead of him: pants unzipped and pushed off his hips, cock in his hand. Johnny's voice was getting a rough edge to it, and Ben guessed he wasn't keeping time with the story, either. Both images were equally vivid in Ben's mind: the fiction of Johnny working him up for a blow job, and the fact of Johnny in that men's room in Delaware with one hand cradling the phone and the other hand around his swelling cock. 

Johnny continued, "So now you're, like, the kisses are getting kind of sloppy, and you've got your hand on top of my hand, and you're grinding really hard. I unzip your fly and you let out this sigh of relief. I drop to my knees, not too fast, teasing you a little, and before I'm all the way down, you've got your hands in my hair, you're pushing me forward. I was going to go really slow, start with my tongue just on the tip of your dick. But you're, like, 'No, more,' so I suck all my breath in and take you in as deep as I can, and you're like, 'Yeah, yeah . . .'" Johnny trailed off into soft moans, but it was all right. He'd gotten Ben close enough that Ben could almost pretend that his hand was Johnny's mouth. Ben finished himself off and reached for a Kleenex.

"Oh, God, _shit_ , I need to get back on the ice," Johnny said.

"Okay," Ben said. "Call me tonight?"

"Jesus Christ, I need a couple minutes. There's a reason people don't usually jerk off while they're standing in skates."

"Funny, I thought it was just 'cause it's cold out on the ice," Ben said.

Johnny giggled ironically. "No, just - just give me a minute to keep picturing you lying on your bed with your dick out and your shirt off."

"Oh, do you want me to take my shirt off?" Ben said.

"It's not like I can tell the difference," Johnny said, "and you'll just throw it on the floor and let it wrinkle."

"All right, shirt on, dick out, are you happy?"

"Happy either way," Johnny said.

"You should go," Ben said. "You should call me when you're done."

Johnny blew a kiss into the phone and wished him a good afternoon. Ben put his pants back on, got up, and stretched. The room didn't feel as empty as it was. Ben took his shirt off, shook it out, and hung it up. Like Johnny had said, it didn't make a difference, but it felt like it might buy them both a few clean landings.

*

There was someone knocking. Johnny had his hands against the wall, palms flat. Ben had his chin resting on Johnny's shoulder, one arm around his chest and the other hand around his cock. Ben was deep inside Johnny, fucking him hard, and Johnny was not trying to be quiet. He was shouting "Fuck, yes" into the hotel room wall, and Ben was saying Johnny's name in his ear, and some asshole was knocking on their door even though they'd definitely stuck a Post-It note to the handle so Tanith or Priscilla or Evan would know to come back later. "Busy!" Johnny yelled.

There was silence, then another knock. Johnny raced to remember the word for "busy" in Russian, got it, and yelled it. "Guest services," the knocker yelled. It was not a voice Johnny recognized. 

"Should I stop?" Ben said, his voice so strained that Johnny doubted it was possible.

"Don't you fucking dare," Johnny said.

They hadn't planned on this. What they had planned on was using the extra hotel room, the one that neither of them would be sleeping in that night, for a little casual hanging out and the draining of the last bottle of duty-free Rodnik that Max had brought with him on tour. In perfect innocence, Johnny had taken out a bottle of moisturizer for his hands. It was scented with vanilla and cloves, and Ben had been drawn to the fragrance. Now, the whole room smelled kind of like Thanksgiving, and Johnny in particular, and especially Johnny's cock. And they had guests on the way. 

Johnny had a policy against answering doors while he was being fucked against a wall. He was flexible, but he had his limits. The hotel didn't seem to be burning down, and Ben was slamming into him so hard it almost hurt, shoving him and especially his cock forward into Ben's grip. He was savoring it, but Ben, conscientious, was hurrying. Johnny yelled one more exuberant "Fuck" and shot bullets into the wall. He collapsed forward, only then noticing that Ben had stopped. "Oh," he said. "You came?"

"Damn," Ben said. "I mean, synchronization's not something I really try for, off the ice."

"Yeah, well, I guess if you do anything enough times," Johnny said, peeling himself back onto his feet and going over to his bag to find a tissue for the mess.

Ben was putting his jeans back on. "Do you think they're still there?" he said.

"If they are, they're fucking pervs," Johnny said.

"I'm gonna go look," Ben said. He went to the door and looked through the peephole. "Oh my _God_ ," he said.

"What?" Johnny said, scrubbing.

"Come look," Ben said, verging on hysterics.

"No, seriously, I think I stained the wallpaper, what?"

"No, I mean it, you have to look for yourself," Ben said.

"Fine," Johnny said.

"Seriously. I have to call Tanith," Ben said.

Johnny surveyed the scene in the hallway as best he could through the tiny telescope in the door. There were at least six teenage girls sitting there, waiting and giggling. "Holy shit," he said. "How the hell did they get my room number?"

"They can probably hear you," Ben said, speed-dialing.

"They can obviously hear me," Johnny said. "Like I fucking care at this point."

"You would have thought you would've - Hey, Tan? Yeah, you're on the fifth floor, right? Yeah. Open your door just a little. Like, put the chain on, right? And just look down the hall. No, trust me. No, I'm serious, I don't care, just do it." There was a long pause, followed by high-pitched laughter so loud that Johnny wasn't sure whether he was hearing it through Ben's phone or from the other end of the hallway. "Oh my God, no, don't come down here. No, don't, just fucking - no, we need more time. Yes, like he's naked, we need more time. Oh, shit, I don't know, think of something, but don't come down here."

"Ask her if she has Ira's number," Johnny said, finding his pants.

Ben asked, and she did.

"Tell her to tell Ira to come over. Tell her to, like - tell her we need ice."

"Tanith says to tell you not to use this as an excuse to fuck with Ira," Ben said.

"I'm not fucking with her," Johnny said. "I'm serious. You know, like, Harvey Keitel in _Pulp Fiction_? She's like that with making things go away."

"Tan wants to know why we can't get our own damn ice," Ben said. "Also, she loves that movie."

"I don't know. Give me the phone?"

"She says she's not talking to you if you're naked."

"Am I naked?" Johnny said, zipping his fly.

"He has pants on," Ben said into the phone. "He's freaking out. I don't know."

"Jesus Christ, you can't just open the door and tell them to leave you alone?" Tanith said, not bothering with hello.

"You've never been groupied before, have you?" Johnny said. 

"Not like that," Tanith said. "There's been, like, a few lone stalkers, weird e-mails, stuff like that. But not troops of teenage girls. How the hell did they get your room number?"

"I don't know. Call Ira. Do you have her number?"

"Don't you?" Tanith said.

"Yeah, but I don't -- If I call, she'll try to calm me down," Johnny said.

"I'm all for that," Ben piped up.

"I have you for that, sweetie," Johnny said to him. "Anyway."

"So I call, I tell her you need ice, she'll know what it means?" Tanith said. 

"Yeah," Johnny said. "And then call Ben back. So we know what's going on."

"Did I mention the thing where you could open your door?" Tanith said.

"If one of your lone stalkers had found out your hotel room number, knocked twice claiming to be a member of the hotel staff, and decided, when you didn't answer, to hang around outside, would you open your door?" Johnny said.

There was a brief but studious silence. "Point taken," she said.

"There are six of them and two of us," Johnny said.

"I count nine, actually," Tanith said. "Okay. Listen. I'm going to call Ira, and you're going to put a shirt on, and you're going to relax, because Ira's like Harvey Keitel in _Pulp Fiction_. Or so I hear."

"Okay," he said.

"Is that a Ben 'okay' or an okay 'okay'?" she said.

"Okay okay," he said.

"Two minutes," Tanith said. "I'm calling back in two minutes."

"Okay," Johnny said, and he hung up the phone. He put on a shirt and got himself a glass of water. 

"I actually do get it now," Ben said. "I mean, it's still funny, but I get it."

Ben was sitting at the edge of the bed. Johnny kneeled across his lap, facing him. "I want to shout your name someday and have everyone hear it," Johnny said. "But not like this."

"Pensacola's not New York," Ben said. "I told you. I get it."

"Someday, though," Johnny said. "I swear to you."

Ben's phone rang right in the middle of their serious moment. Ben answered and held the phone so both of them could hear. "Okay, she's coming down the hall," Tanith said. "She has an actual ice bucket. Wasn't that supposed to be code?"

"It's also literal," Johnny said.

"Okay. Anyway. She's got the ice bucket, she's there, she's smiling. She's shaking her head. I can't hear anything; she's talking really softly. Can you hear anything?"

"She's talking _really_ softly," Ben said.

"She's taking something out of her pocket," Tanith said. "She's putting down the ice bucket. She's taking out a pen and she's signing stuff. And she's signing stuff, and she's smiling, and she's hugging scary teenage groupies, and holy shit, they're leaving. That's fucking amazing."

"Is she walking away?" Johnny said.

"No, she's hanging around the door. I think she's waiting until they get on the elevator. Okay, yeah, I think she's heading for the ice machine. But they're totally gone. You're free."

"Then can you, like, bring the cooler over?" Ben said. 

"I thought there was going to be really expensive vodka," Tanith said.

"That's not getting drunk vodka," Johnny said. "That's, like, serious conversation vodka."

"I'll be right over," Tanith said. 

This time, when there were girls at the door, Johnny let them in. Tanith took the post-it off the doorknob and stuck it to Ben's forehead, and he took it off and stuck it to her, and they were soon distracted with post-it-related goofiness that Johnny didn't mind being excluded from. Ira wrapped Johnny in a tight hug and ruffled his hair. "You are better now?"

"I owe you," he said.

"You owe me nothing," Ira said. "We're even. I asked you to, to making a promise that you could not keep."

"I thought it was a promise I could make," he said.

"You didn't," Ira said. "You were in love already."

"I was _not_ ," he said. He looked over at Tanith and Ben. She was standing on the desk, holding the post-it over her head. Ben lifted her up by her hips and grabbed the post-it out of her hand. She went limp and sent them both crashing, laughing, to the floor. There was nothing sexual about it. It made Johnny love him more, that he could connect like that with somebody else, that he had that much to give. "Okay, maybe I was," Johnny said. "Maybe a little."

"I think you are allowed," Ira said.

"So you release me from my promise? I'm free to love?"

She shrugged off the sarcasm. "He is . . . _mili_. Cute." They both cringed as Ben overturned a chair. "Destructive."

Tanith stood up, face to face with Ben, and held the post-it up in front of his nose while she ripped it in half slowly. "Hey," Ben said. "You can't tear it. That's cheating."

"Ha, I _win_ ," Tanith said. 

Johnny looked around the room, which now looked like a herd of elephants had stampeded through it and then had sex. He'd always kind of wanted to trash a hotel room. He stared in admiration at these girls, these women. Sometimes, he loved women so much he wished he were attracted to them. Girls could save your life: the ones you found on your own, the ones you inherited. And they were dangerous, but they were worth it. Like love, like expensive semi-legal vodka, like anything.

*

Ben was never going to be gay enough to appreciate _Beaches_. He and Johnny had just reached their four-month anniversary, which itself required a certain level of non-heterosexuality. He was comfortable arguing with Johnny over which days of the week each of them had imaginary rights to Orlando Bloom's ass, or discussing the fact that the weird bump in Owen Wilson's nose was actually the thing that made him so hot. He'd gotten to this place where the last of the residual internalized homophobia had fallen away and he was a little bit fixated on Johnny's cock, really into giving blow jobs or sticking his hand down the front of Johnny's pants when he wasn't quite ready for it, to the point where Johnny would, for example, have to whisper that it was adorable that Ben was obsessed with his penis but maybe backstage at the Colorado Springs World Arena wasn't the best place for playing with it. But five minutes of Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey crying, and Ben was at the front of the bus playing Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega emulator he'd downloaded.

He was having a hard time getting Sonic to do a half-pipe into a vitally important secret tunnel, so he didn't notice right away that Stéphane was watching him play. Stéphane had joined the tour in July, by which point the inside jokes and new friendships had become well-defined. Stéphane, while a good sport, had been operating in a state of social confusion for the two months since, despite everyone's best efforts to include him. 

Ben finally got Sonic into the tunnel, only to send him careening off a cliff to his death. He punched the empty seat next to him and decided to take a break from the game for a while. "You and Johnny have separated," Stéphane said. "I didn't think I would live to see this."

It was a little harsh coming from someone who Ben considered an acquaintance, but the language barrier was probably involved, and he was grateful that Stéphane hadn't commented on the game-related outburst of violence. "My love has limits," Ben said, "and one of them is movies where women die of cancer."

"So there is a problem? You are not, eh, getting along?"

"No, there are just times when we - we _are_ capable of detaching from each other," Ben said. "And sometimes we need to."

"Oh, okay," Stéphane said. "Sometimes you . . . your English is difficult when there aren't any French speakers nearby." 

Now that Ben thought about it, he'd never had a conversation with Stéphane without Tanith, Johnny, or Gwendal around. They probably had to work furiously to explain his sarcasm. "Sorry," he said. "I can slow down."

"You speak nothing but English?" 

"Spanish, badly," Ben said. 

"Yo también," Stéphane said. "Un poco."

"Pero no, um, no va a ayudarnos mucho," Ben managed to spit out. 

"English is better," Stéphane said.

"Definitely," Ben said.

"It's a shame that we don't communicate better," Stéphane said. "Because I think - I feel we have some things in common." He made it sound like the beginning of a Serious Talk, the kind that explained what you couldn't tell the press about your new boyfriend or which cities you couldn't hold hands in.

"Oh?" Ben said.

"Well, we are not sitting in the back and watching sad movies," Stéphane said. 

"True enough," Ben said. He wanted to follow that up with another observation, their secret unexplored connection, but he wasn't coming up with much. They didn't have the same taste in music or TV or movies. Stéphane complained all the time that everyone spent too much bus time on their computers, and Ben could hardly be pried away from his. They barely even shared a language. But he realized what Stéphane meant. "Silver," he said.

"Right," Stéphane said. 

"It's shiny," Ben said. "It's surreal."

"You want to wear it all the time," Stéphane said.

"Not really," Ben said. At the moment, there was a Homer Simpson gumball machine in Detroit that was wearing it. Ben liked putting it on different bizarre items, anything with a neck. He was so proud of that performance that it frightened him a little. He'd dreamed a few times that he'd dropped Tanith during their original dance and forgotten, and he'd only found out later that they'd lost. It was easier to treat that medal as just an object, just a symbol. It kept the bad dreams at bay.

"Because it reminds you that you are better than he is?" Stéphane said.

In Detroit, he'd offered to let Johnny try the medal on, and Johnny had turned him down. He'd said he wasn't going to wear one until he'd earned it. "I'm not better than him," Ben said. " _You're_ better than him."

"So why you are with him?" Stéphane leaned forward almost imperceptibly. Europeanly. 

"Please don't hit on me," Ben said. "You're not my type."

Ben expected the palms-up gesture of misunderstanding, the stuttered apology. But what he got was, "Then what is?"

Not scary Eurotrash, Ben thought. He wanted to transmit that telepathically to the back of the bus, because it would have made Johnny and Tanith laugh. "I don't know," he said.

"Women?" Stéphane said.

"What?"

"There is a rumor," Stéphane said. "I don't know if I believe this rumor. But there is a rumor you are not gay."

"Okay," Ben said. 

"So what do you think? Is there a reason for this rumor?"

"Sure," Ben said.

"You don't want to talk about it," Stéphane said. He put his ear buds in his ears emphatically. "I understand." 

"I'm not gay," Ben said. The statement startled Stéphane into sitting up straight and taking his ear buds back out. Ben suppressed a grin. "I had a girlfriend. I was in love with her. Johnny doesn't, like, reverse that or erase it or anything. I loved her, and I love him, and I guess that makes me bi, or whatever, but I don't know. It seems like it's so much more important to other people than it is to me."

Maintaining his pattern of inscrutable body language, Stéphane smiled and relaxed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have, eh, assumed I was the first person to ask."

"It's been, like, three times a week since April," Ben said.

"And you're obviously happy," Stéphane said, "So why does it matter what you are calling yourself?"

Ben would have said something, thanked him, but one of the good things about the language barrier was that you were allowed to let the moment speak for itself. Stéphane was about to go back to his music, and Ben reached for his computer, but he realized he had a question. "Who's starting rumors, anyway?" he said. "Was it that fucking Emanuel Sandhu again? Is he looking for a threesome or something?"

"You say it like it's a joke," Stéphane said.

"Seriously?" Ben said. "Jesus."

"It's all just gossip," Stéphane said. "It doesn't mean anything."

"Yeah, I know, but --"

"If the press knows I fucked fourteen guys in Torino, then maybe it means something," Stéphane said. "But they know, and they do not print it. Because it's only gossip."

"They know about all fourteen?" Ben said, trying not to sound like a Puritan. Tanith had racked up higher numbers than that over the course of the summer, although she'd had several months to find out just how good of a pickup line "I was voted ESPN's hottest female athlete of 2006" was. By Stéphane's standards, she was slacking.

"Do they know every arena where you got a blow job in the locker room during the second act?" Stéphane said.

"Fewer than you'd think," Ben said.

"Not so clean?"

"Not so private," Ben said. "Seriously, fourteen? That's, like, one a day."

"I have ambition," Stéphane said. "And I feel, I don't have a, a shortage of men who are, eh, interested, so I think, why fall in love? After I retire, I will have a boyfriend."

"Hey, I tried," Ben said. "I think I just . . . get really into one person at a time."

A kiss seemed to come down from the heavens onto the top of his head, and he thought he was imagining things. But it was Johnny, saying he was sweet, then throwing his arms around his neck and adding, "Did you realize that your dance partner has never seen _Heathers_?"

"What?"

"Come on. We had to stop _Beaches_ in the middle. It's a pop culture emergency. How did you let this happen?"

"Gross negligence," Ben said. "I'm so sorry."

"You need to keep a better eye on that girl," Johnny said.

"How am I supposed to do that and go down on you at the same time?" Ben said.

"I don't know, you're talented," Johnny said. "Come on, put the hedgehog game away and watch teen movies. I'll rub your neck and stuff."

Ben glanced over at Stéphane, who was looking lost. "Oh, they're putting on a different movie," Ben said, slowing down and keeping an eye on his slang. "You should watch with us."

"No more crying women?" Stéphane said.

Ben could feel Johnny getting ready to speak French. He reached a hand behind him and clapped his hand over Johnny's mouth. Johnny squirmed and licked Ben's palm. Ben said, "Dead teenagers. Christian Slater. _Young_ Christian Slater."

"Who?" Stéphane said.

Johnny pried Ben's hand off his face. "Holy shit, pop culture _emergency_ ," he said. 

"It sounds like you're coming with us," Ben said.

"Should I call Emanuel?" Stéphane said, actually pulling out his phone.

*

Johnny loved driving into Las Vegas. For one thing, it was the last stop on the tour, the end of the long summer. But the thing he really loved was the view from the highway, the lights that danced over the desert, miming the seductive lie that they'd almost arrived. He held Ben's arm tightly as he stared out the window, each of them blanketed in the solitary worlds of their own mp3 playlists. Ben kept fidgeting and shifting his arm, but he didn't ask Johnny to let go. He didn't seem to want to be let go of.

They were staying in Vegas for a few days after the show for a charity event and to say goodbye to each other. The whole idea of goodbye felt dishonest, since they weren't breaking up, and since they were already well accustomed to spending so long on the phone with each other during their nights apart that the distance seemed to disappear. It was going to be a slow, wearying autumn of training and phone sex, but for Johnny, that was just what autumn was. He would watch the leaves fall and learn his new competition programs and wait for the weather to turn so the season could start. People thought that summer was the worst time of year for skaters, but autumn was when the nerves rose up, when the injuries crept back to nag you into second-guessing yourself, when the anticipation stole away the jumps and the spin positions that you'd had nailed down for Worlds. He was hanging onto his quad toe loop precariously enough. He worried about having to hang onto his relationship, too, of losing that to nerves.

Ben was unreadable. He kept dozing off on Johnny's shoulder and waking up disoriented. Johnny tried to remember what life was like without Ben half asleep next to him. It was hard to believe that a world like that existed, much less that he'd be returning to it in a few days. Ben lived so much in the moment; he showed active signs of struggle when he had to move his mind outside of it. Johnny had to work just as hard not to get ahead of himself. But Ben's way of thinking, and his serenity in it, were infectious.

"Stop missing me already," Ben said.

"Stop breathing," Johnny said.

"So you can miss me sooner?" Ben said.

"That's not what I meant," Johnny said.

"I know what you meant," Ben said.

"So you're just messing with me."

"That's new to you?"

Johnny clasped his breast and affected a swoon. "Our whole relationship is based on lies," he said.

"Don't go back to Delaware," Ben said. "We can run away together somewhere. We'll go to Spain and live on sangria and olives."

"Okay, you've said it, you can put it away," Johnny said.

"Good," Ben said. "I hate olives."

"We'll make it work," Johnny said. "I mean, we already said we're meeting up in Chicago in October. My mom is, like, insisting that you come to Delaware before that. I'm going to make the Grand Prix Final if it kills me. And even Nationals aren't that far away." 

"Was there any doubt?" Ben said. "That we're going to make it work."

"There's always doubt," Johnny said.

Ben ran his hand slowly down Johnny's face. "Shh," he said. "Stop that."

"I will not start crying on this bus," Johnny sniffled.

"We've got five whole days," Ben said. "You and me can accomplish a lot in five days."

"I guess," Johnny said.

"I mean, break it down into blow jobs," Ben said. "That's, like, fifteen."

"Twenty," Johnny said.

"You're ambitious."

"But you knew that," Johnny said.

"You're not going to leave me any time to gamble," Ben said.

"You were planning on it?"

"I don't know, I've been cleaning the girls out of Skittles pretty good," Ben said.

"I just, I don't get gambling. For money. Money you could spend on, like -"

"Shoes?" Ben said. "Seriously, I thought you liked this city."

"I like it from far away," Johnny said. "A lot of things are pretty from a distance, but not that many things stay pretty. It just - it's like, it doesn't seem right that our last city together should be tacky."

Ben looked out the window, knitting his brows in deep thought. They were just close enough to the city that they could see the criss-crossing spotlights that batted the air above the Strip. "I think it's perfect," Ben said. "I think it's totally appropriate to be somewhere that you can only appreciate ironically."

"I guess," Johnny said.

"No, seriously, I think we should go out in a blaze of irony. We should get, like, a honeymoon suite with a heart-shaped Jacuzzi and red satin sheets and a mirror on the ceiling."

Johnny couldn't suppress a smile. It was the kind of thing he would suggest so that people could dismiss it. Except that when Ben said things like that, he actually wanted them, and Johnny was more likely to make him follow through than talk him out of them. They reinforced each other; they were dangerous together. "You think they're not all booked?"

"It's Vegas," Ben said, "and we're, like, vaguely famous." He dragged his backpack out from under the seat in front of him and got out his phone. People usually got annoyed when people made phone calls from the bus, but this wasn't some two-hour mushy call to Russia. This was logistics. It took Ben a couple of tries and some baroque demonstrations of identity, but he convinced the reservations desk at Paris to give them a suite. "It won't be ready until tomorrow," he told Johnny. "I told them that was fine."

"Tomorrow is totally fine," Johnny said. He rested his chin on Ben's shoulder and kissed his neck. "Would you have ever done something like this before we got together?" he said, needing to be able to take credit for something.

"I wouldn't have anybody to do it for," Ben said. He turned his head to the side so he could kiss Johnny's lips. They were affectionate kisses, not sexual ones, lips only slightly parted. But they must have looked like more than they were, because someone started grumbling loudly about people who always seemed to need an audience.

"Could you just face forward for two minutes?" Tanith said, not even yelling. "It's their last ride." Ben paused to thank her, but she was wrong, Johnny thought. This wasn't their last anything.

*

It was five in the morning, and there was a man standing several stories below the balcony of the honeymoon suite, shouting "Jessica!" over and over. Ben had hoped to sleep in on the last morning of his summer, but it looked like fate had other plans. Johnny was stirring and muttering into his pillow. Ben put on his glasses and some underwear and opened the sliding door to the balcony. The sun was just starting to come up, a pale line over the mountains. The glow of the Strip polluted the desert with magenta and green.

"She's not coming for you, man," Ben yelled down.

"Fuck you," the guy yelled back, but Ben could make out the dim figure skulking away, shamed into another drink.

That was the kind of week it had been. The room was an even better parody of itself than they'd expected: the walls covered in pink Eiffel Tower-patterned wallpaper, remote controls and satin upholstery everywhere, a "celebrity gift basket" full of expensive champagne and unidentifiable exotic fruit. At first, they'd planned to live on room service the entire time, but that got disgusting after the first day. In fact, most things about the honeymoon suite had gotten old after twenty-four hours. They were bored, with nowhere to skate or even work out. Despite Johnny's ambitions, what sex they were having was on the depressing side, a countdown to the end. It was impossible to forget that they were saying goodbye to each other.

Johnny's flight would leave at 11:00; Ben's was a couple of hours later. Somehow, it was reassuring that they only had a few hours left together. Instead of worrying about how much they had to fit into a few days, Ben knew they couldn't possibly finish everything they'd planned. They had months to do everything, or years, however long they stayed together. He liked that better, feeling like he could take his time, like he didn't have to do anything he didn't want to.

Johnny was lying flat on his back, pretending to sleep. Ben could tell the difference. He'd thrown off the covers when he'd gotten out of bed to yell at the Jessica guy, and Johnny hadn't wrapped them back around him. He had one hand raised over his head, wrist against his forehead, like a girl in a silent movie, but he also had a couple of days' growth on his face. Those were the little paradoxes that made Ben love to watch Johnny pretend to sleep. He liked it more that Johnny was faking, that he knew he was being admired. Johnny didn't always remember that he was worthy of it.

"What time is it?" Johnny yawned.

"I don't know. Early. Sun's coming up," Ben said.

"Shit. I need to pack." 

Ben had heard that line in every city from Tampa to Vegas, usually at sunrise. By now, he was well aware that Johnny could have all of his belongings neatly folded and his suitcase closed in ten minutes. He was a pro. Like any of them. "Don't move," Ben said. He jumped up onto the bed, took another bounce to get on all fours on top of Johnny, and put a hand flat on Johnny's chest to hold him where he wanted him.

"Oh," Johnny said.

"Is it all right?"

"Whatever you want," Johnny said.

"No." Ben rocked backward onto his knees and clasped his hands behind his back.

Johnny closed his eyes and grinned broadly. "Whatever _I_ want." He sat up and pulled Ben forward. Somehow -- Ben was too busy staring into his eyes to figure it out -- he got himself into Ben's lap, leaning his shoulders against the overstuffed satin headboard. He wrapped his hand around the base of Ben's cock and ran it upward. "You were watching me again," he said.

"Obviously," Ben said.

"It's really easy to be in love with someone who gets hard from watching you sleep," Johnny said. He kissed Ben, mouth open and hands free, with a shift of weight that tipped Ben backward. Ben caught himself instinctively on the heels of his hands. Ben didn't hear Johnny grab the lube or warm it between his palms, just felt his cock being caressed with it and brought to the point of aching. And Johnny, shifting his hips forward, working, guiding Ben inside him. Johnny dug his sticky fingertips into Ben's back. They were moving together, Ben's hips and thighs up against the resistance of his arms, Johnny's back and ass downward and forward. The way Ben could take any motion and break it down into sections, into muscles, and at the same time feel the whole of it. Johnny had made it all right to see that as a sexual thing. Also all right to be mired in his head and at the same time abandoned, straining, closer and closer as Johnny kissed his name back into his mouth. Johnny's voice got deeper when he came, a growl that rose from his chest and behind his ears. Ben followed with a shout as Johnny collapsed and relaxed forward into him. Ben released the tension in his arms and they fell together onto the bed.

"That was it, wasn't it?" Johnny said. "That was the last one."

"We could do it again in a minute," Ben said.

"If you want," Johnny said.

"But you're thinking we should go out on the high note?"

"Shouldn't you always?" Johnny said.


	4. Exhibition Program.

It was amazing how a pre-competition reception in Moscow could look just like a pre-competition reception in Calgary. Or St. Louis or Düsseldorf or Beijing, for that matter. It must have taken serious amounts of ISU committee work to make these things so depressingly identical. Ben had already given up on the dried-out food and the attempts at conversation with other miserably jet-lagged skaters. It was a major effort to keep himself separated from Johnny, but at official events they had to avoid looking like a couple. When they were within arm's reach, they had to fight to keep their hands to themselves, but even from across the room they tended to make eyes at each other. So they were staying as far away from each other as possible, with Maria Petrova and Tanith running interference. They were forcing themselves to spend exactly eighty-six minutes at this shindig, and then they were cutting out so Johnny could introduce Ben to Moscow's sparkly gay underbelly.

They spent so much of their relationship waiting. Before, Ben had mentally divided his life into the blocks of time between major competitions and exhibitions; now, parallel to those blocks were another set, the countdown of days until he'd see Johnny again. They were managing to sneak away from training and Grand Prix season about once a month. Ben had gone down to Delaware in September, at Johnny's mom's insistence, and they'd escaped for a weekend in Chicago just before Halloween. Now, as November waned into winter, they were both skating at the Cup of Russia. Another grueling practice schedule, another week in a drab hotel, another reminder that in their most defining and public moments, their relationship had to disappear. 

Ben got so used to checking his watch and frowning at its slowness that he almost forgot to leave when the time came. Johnny was waiting at the side exit when we got there. "We've _got_ to stop meeting like this," Ben said. 

"We could always retire and out ourselves," Johnny said. "I'm thinking . . . beach house in Thailand?"

"Thailand's out," Ben said. "Nowhere to skate." Not wanting to hang out by the hotel long enough to get caught, Ben started walking. Johnny caught him by the elbow and swung him around to walk in the opposite direction. "Do you seriously think about it?" Ben said.

"When I'm having a bad day of practice?" Johnny said. "Doesn't everybody? Like, just for a second, you think you could just quit. And then you remember, wait, you're really fucking good at this."

"Do you need me to remind you of that?" Ben said. "Because, like, I watched you at Skate Canada on ESPN, and I could be wrong, but I thought I saw a clean quad toe-triple toe."

"I had to put in the quad combination. I was up against fucking Lambiel. I wanted to do a triple loop, but I didn't have enough speed," Johnny said. He sounded disappointed in himself, and of course he was: he knew he could do better. "And also? The asshole I'm dating told me he was withholding blow jobs if I didn't."

"That was _such_ an empty threat," Ben said.

"Don't tell me that. Now I'm all unmotivated."

"It _was_ an empty threat," Ben recovered. "Now it's for real. No quad, no head."

"I hate that I love you," Johnny said, his whole body full of the smile that showed he meant exactly the opposite. 

"You were smiling all through your short in Paris," Ben said. "Dick Button talked through half your program on ESPN about how you were smiling."

"I guess they've got to think of something to fill the air with when I'm not fucking up," Johnny said.

"They're just trying to distract the viewers from the fact that they call half the jumps wrong."

"At least they know what my components are called," Johnny said. "When they're talking over your programs, it's all, 'Look, they did a footwork thingy.'"

"Actually, that's the technical name for it," Ben said. 

"So what's the technical name for there's this one place in your original dance where you do a left outside bracket and she does a right outside counter and one of you's got to be wrong because it looks really fucking weird?"

Ben put a hand to his forehead and laughed softly. 

"Is that a thing?" Johnny said.

"I'll tell Marina you think it looks weird, let's put it that way. Seriously, she says she thinks you're a smart skater. We might actually change it."

"Your coaches say nice things about me?" 

"My coaches loved you before we were even dating," Ben said. They'd escaped the skating complex, and Moscow's lights were glittery and alien. Ben didn't have to ask: he knew they were headed for the Metro. Johnny was a big fan of public transportation to begin with, and he had rhapsodized on the phone about the beautiful stations, some of them like little museums. He was quiet, and that was probably what he was daydreaming about. Ben would have let him retreat into his mind, but they didn't have a lot of time together. He said, "It's been the strangest season. And I mean, not, like, the skating itself. It's all, like, people who've barely said hi to me suddenly think they're my best friends, and people who used to be really warm won't even talk to me." Before Johnny could say it, he added, "But that's how it's always been for you, right?"

"Can you live with it being like that?" Johnny said.

"I realized in our first week together that you're just a big ball of consequences," Ben said.

"And drama," Johnny said, leading him down into a Metro station. "Don't forget the drama."

"I like the drama," Ben said. "I _love_ the drama."

"You _are_ the drama," Johnny said. "Like, possibly even more than I am."

Ben couldn't deny it. "Don't tell," he said.

"Like anyone would believe me," Johnny said. "Okay, pay attention, we're only going, like, two stops."

"Am I allowed to ask where you're taking me?"

"We're getting Chinese," Johnny said, ridiculously proud of himself. "I was on the phone with Ira last night, and she knows a place, and she _demanded_ that I take you there."

"You know I just left China, right?" Ben said. 

"This is different," Johnny said. "This is Russian Chinese food." 

It sounded like Ben had shattered his enthusiasm. Part of being with Johnny was knowing when he needed his ego trimmed and knowing when he needed to be built up and reassured. Ben was getting better at that, but he was still wrong sometimes. Johnny's emotions were hard to predict. Knowing that he was never going to master them, that there would always be an element of crossing his fingers and risking a mistake, made it easier to be wrong. "No, it's perfect," Ben said. "It's totally perfect."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following five scenes didn't quite make it into the main story. Explanations are as follows:
> 
> 1\. Tour bus banter #1. At least one of my betas mentioned that they wished there were more Sasha, Evan, and Kimmie in the fic. Here they are. I love this scene, but it didn't advance the narrative at all, and I couldn't get it to fit in anywhere.
> 
> 2\. Gratuitous porn. Templemarker was feeling down one night, and she asked for a little something about Ben's secret sex toy stash. I was a little sad to let it go, since it's the only glimpse we get of Johnny's visit to Detroit, but she and I agreed that it just would have been redundant.
> 
> 3\. Tour bus banter #2. I wrote this on the fly at Writercon just before I originally posted this fic to Livejournal. I went to Liz Marcs's panel on writing ensemble, and she made us _write_ , darn her. We were supposed to write to a prompt, but the prompt was for S1 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I had not watched in ages. So I was a jerk and ditched the prompt to write a bunch of skaters riffing on pirate movies. Still, I think this follows a lot of the guidelines and tips that the panel laid out.
> 
> 4\. Schmoop. I wrote this for Sandyk during a round of fic prompts while she was beta reading, so it was actually the first glimpse of this story universe that some people saw. It's . . . cute.
> 
> 5\. Alternate ending. This was the original epilogue to the story. It got jossed when the 2006 Grand Prix assignments went out, and Anna and I agreed that it just felt kind of flat. I transferred most of the funny and/or important moments to the revised epilogue, but there are a few things I really like here.

1.

"Two words," Ben said. "'Afternoon Delight.' It's the ultimate song you can never skate to, no matter how funny it would be. Seriously. I defy anyone to come up with something better."

"Oh, that's easy," Johnny said. "'Dirrrty.' I mean, anything by Christina, really, I love her voice so much, but that would be the one I'd get in trouble for."

"As long as we're going there?" Evan said. "'Milkshake.'"

"Or oh my God, I actually kind of hate this song? But that 'Hard out here being a pimp' song," Kimmie said.

"I can hear Dick Button now," Ben said. "'That Kimmie Meissner, she's really grown up fast.'"

"You know what I've always wanted to do because it would actually make a great program?" Tanith said. "'Across 110th Street,' by Bobby Womack."

"Since when do you listen to Bobby Womack?" Ben said.

"Since I downloaded _Jackie Brown_ ," Tanith said. 

"I'm all for it, if it means I get to wear a pimp costume," Ben said.

"How come I always have to be the whore?" Tanith said.

There was prolonged silence, because there was no safe answer to that question.

"Wait, I've got one," Evan said. "Soundtrack from _Brokeback Mountain_."

"You can't even skate to that," Johnny said. "No rhythm."

"Oh!" Sasha said. "'I Touch Myself.'"

"We know, Sasha," Johnny said. She blushed.

"Wait, have you guys heard of Depeche Mode?" Kimmie said. "Because, like, 'Blasphemous Rumors.'"

"'Master and Servant' would be even better," Ben said.

"See? You _are_ just thinking of excuses to dress me up as a whore," Tanith said.

"Yeah, but you'd be a bondage whore," Ben said.

"Well, then, just go all the way with it and do 'Venus in Furs,'" Tanith said.

"Okay, now that we're totally in the realm of songs you can't physically skate to?" Johnny said. "If you guys get to do bondage porn, I get to do 'Johnny Are You Queer.'"

"That might actually be funnier if Evan did it," Sasha said.

"Hey!" Evan said.

"No, just, seeing as you're, like, the great heterosexual hope of figure skating and stuff," Sasha said.

"Well, if that's the problem, then I should just do ABBA, right?" Evan said. 

"People have done ABBA, haven't they?" Tanith said. "I mean, somebody must have. You'd totally get away with it."

"Even 'Dancing Queen'?" Evan said. 

"You'd totally get it approved," Johnny said. "Like, depending on the program, you might be asked never to skate it again, but you'd probably get to do it once."

"I'm asking my coach," Evan said.

"Oh, don't," Sasha said. "You'll just--"

"No. I'm totally asking Frank. Right now." He dashed to the back of the bus, garnering a nasty look from the bus driver, and took out his phone. He was too far away for anyone to hear what he was saying, but his gestures were animated. "He says yes," Evan shouted.

2.

They'd been in Detroit for less than twenty-four hours, and Johnny had already found the handcuffs. It had taken hard work and persistence, but he'd known that a guy like Ben would have something embarrassing in a shoebox under his bed, and there they were. He sat in Ben's unmade bed with his nose in the new Jennifer Weiner novel and the handcuffs in his lap. When Ben emerged from his shower, still drying his wild hair, Johnny rushed to dangle the handcuffs from his fingers suggestively. "When were you planning on telling me about these?" Johnny said.

"Oh," Ben said, smiling shyly into his towel.

"Sorry," Johnny said. "I shouldn't have gone through your things."

"No, it's just -"

Johnny knew what it meant when Ben got vague like this. The entire city of Detroit seemed to have this effect on him: every landmark made him think of his ex. Johnny didn't fault him for it. They'd been together long enough to leave a lot of scars. "Were they a present from Merrie?" Johnny said, hoping he didn't sound jealous.

"Not exactly," Ben said, still cagey.

"I'll put them back where I found them," Johnny said, dog-earing his book and scrambling out of his very comfortable position.

"Okay, see, Tanith and I? We give each other joke gifts sometimes. Like, when she goes somewhere and I don't. Inappropriate souvenirs. It's, like, it started small and turned into X-rated playing cards and stuff." He snatched the handcuffs away from Johnny. "I think she went to Alcatraz or something," he said. "Either that or the Valley."

"So you've never actually used them?" Johnny said. He didn't need to wait for an answer. "Give them here."

Ben held the handcuffs behind his back. "What'll you give me for them?"

"Blow job," Johnny said with a grin.

Ben responded by climbing on top of Johnny and pushing him down onto his back. Johnny squirmed, and Ben caught his wrist, locking it in one of the cuffs. "This isn't what I meant," Johnny said.

"If it isn't what you meant, then why did you take them out of the box in the first place?" Ben said.

"I was going to put them on _you_ , silly," Johnny said.

"Oh, of course," Ben said. "You were going to put _my_ handcuffs on _me_." He threaded the chain around one of the bedposts but hesitated before cuffing Johnny's other wrist. "Was the key still in the box?"

"Yeah," Johnny said. "I made sure." 

That was apparently all the reassurance Ben needed to close the cuff around Johnny's wrist. Johnny was trapped flat on his back with his hands over his head: the bedpost was tall, and flexible as he was, he wasn't double-jointed. But Ben could ease him free if he needed to. Johnny wriggled and resisted, and it was mostly just playfulness, although it was kind of unnerving to let Ben have such complete control over him. Ben was usually so indecisive, so happy to let Johnny take charge when they had sex. Maybe he was getting restless. Johnny hoped that he was, and that he trusted Johnny enough to express that, to be honest about that need.

Ben ran his hands up and down Johnny's chest, under his shirt, like he wasn't sure where to start. But when Johnny opened his mouth to make a suggestion, Ben clapped a hand over it so he couldn't speak. Still covering Johnny's mouth, Ben went for his neck. He nipped gently at the skin for a while, sending a little more blood rushing to Johnny's cock with each tiny bite. He squeezed Johnny's nipple, making Johnny writhe under his hands. Johnny was wearing tight jeans, mostly for Ben's benefit, and he was getting uncomfortable in them. Without thinking, he tried to reach down to unzip his fly, but the cuffs dug into his wrists. 

Ben got the message, and he used it as an excuse to torture Johnny more intensely. He put one hand where Johnny had no choice but to grind against it, found the tip of Johnny's cock with his thumb and circled it. Meanwhile, he focused his lips and tongue on the side of Johnny's neck, sucking hard enough to leave a mark. The ache of his cock and the pressure of Ben's teeth made Johnny whimper and struggle. Ben took his hand off Johnny's mouth for a merciful moment, but when Johnny started to beg for release, Ben covered it again. Ben had developed a sense of Johnny's timing, though, and he must have been able to tell that Johnny wasn't going to last much longer. He fumbled Johnny's fly open with one hand. Johnny gasped with relief. "Finally," he said into Ben's hand.

"Shh," Ben commanded. He had to free Johnny's mouth in order to go down on him, but Johnny pursed his lips, willing to pretend for him. He kept silent as Ben gripped the base of his cock and teased his balls with his thumb. Ben could get Johnny's cock in his mouth about halfway now, which was more than enough, especially since he'd mastered the pressure of his lips as he moved up and down over Johnny's cock, the sideways movement of his tongue underneath. Johnny arched his back against the resistance of the cuffs. He loosed a couple of breathy, rebellious "oh"s as he came. "I hate you so much right now," he said, knowing that Ben would hear the irony and know that he meant exactly the opposite.

 

3\. 

Tanith was trying to listen to her new TV on the Radio mp3s. They were amazing songs, and Evan was going to ask about them, and also it was _so_ unfair to eavesdrop on Ben and Johnny (not to mention also unpleasantly X-rated). But they'd all snuck out of the hotel the night before to see _Pirates of the Caribbean 2_ (because hi, _pirate movie_ ), and it had spawned, like, round eight million and three of the battle for Orlando Bloom's ass. 

"What are you smoking?" Totally hotter as an elf," Ben was saying. "I mean, the ears. The hair. The bow and arrow."

"The ears are weird, the facial hair is hot, and a sword is a better phallic symbol," Johnny said. "I can't even believe we're having this conversation."

Tanith couldn't hold it in anymore. "You have this conversation _daily_ ," she said, turning around to kneel with her arms resting on the back of the seat.

"So. Fine. Settle it," Johnny said. "Elf or pirate?"

"That's _so_ not my job," Tanith said.

"How many more hours is it to Portland?" Ben said. "Because I'm _sure_ we could keep debating this till we get there." 

Tanith rolled her eyes at him: he was too far away for her to punch him. "Okay, the truth is? I'm just not that into Orlando Bloom. I'm more of a Johnny Depp girl. And Keira Knightley. I would totally switch teams for Keira Knightley."

Evan, sitting across the aisle, piped up. "Where's the switch? She looks like a boy. Seriously, like, _I'd_ do her."

"Oh, come on," Ben said. "In the corset, she's almost got a rack."

"See?" Tanith said. "She totally counts for my imaginary bi-curious experiment."

"So," Ben said. "Elf, right?"

"Still not taking a side on this," Tanith said.

"Totally with you on the Depp, though," Evan said.

"Thank you," Tanith said. She pivoted on her knees and leaned across the aisle to kiss him on the cheek.

Michelle peeked around her seat. "You guys are loud," she said. "Also, come on. Norrington. The stubble alone, my _God_."

Tanith wasn't sure why everyone else went silent, but her excuse was astonishment at the sudden emergence of Michelle's dirty mind. 

"Christ, that was a bad movie," Johnny said, finally.

"Unlike certain Oscar-winning movies with elves in them," Ben said.

"This doesn't mean you win," Tanith said.

"No, he wins," Michelle said. "You don't argue with Oscar." You also didn't argue with Michelle, so it was settled.

4.

All of Johnny's moods were a little bit scary, but his good moods might have been the scariest. Good moods brought blow jobs first thing in the morning, but they also brought out-of-tune impromptu shower renditions of Christina Aguilera songs. A cloud of steam announced that Johnny was done in the bathroom, and he came out with his towel stretched out behind him like a cape, spinning and leaping. He was going to break something, or break himself, and Ben was not going to watch. He buried his face into his pillow and pretended to still be asleep. 

Johnny bounded onto the bed and poked Ben with his foot. "Your turn," he sang. He jumped over Ben onto the floor, pirouetted, and threw the curtains open. "Good morning, Portland," he said.

"Jesus, you just blinded me," Ben said. "Also, aren't you naked?"

"We're on, like, the tenth floor, who's looking? It's a beautiful day in a non-crappy city where it's never a beautiful day, and I'm -"

"Torturing me with it," Ben said. He stretched and rolled out of bed. 

Johnny took him by the hand, lifted him to his feet, and spun him around. "I thought I was cute when I'm happy," he said, pouting a little.

"You'll be really cute in about ten minutes," Ben yawned.

"Don't lie to me," Johnny said. "You love it when I'm crazy. You're looking down on that city right now and realizing that most of them don't have, like, a constant mental soundtrack and a taste for exhibitionism."

"It's Portland. They might."

"They aren't, and you don't want them to be, because if everyone were as crazy as you and me? You wouldn't be taking home all those silver medals."

"Maybe," Ben said.

"Admit it," Johnny said. "You like me because I'm fabulous and obnoxious."

"No," Ben said and kissed him. "That's why I love you."

5\. 

Johnny kept reminding himself that they'd really be something if they made it to Thanksgiving. Eight months sounded like a real relationship, a real accomplishment. It was what he repeated in his head when the press asked him coy questions about dating and it was all he could do to keep from erupting into diva rage. Someday, he'd tell them, tell everybody, say, "Look, I'm gay, we're all gay, that's the way this sport is." But it wasn't time for that, and more and more, he didn't believe it was his responsibility to say it. He'd taken the fall enough times so that other people could hide in the closet. He had the perfect fantasy of the ten-page _New Yorker_ profile or the _Men's Vogue_ fashion spread, the one where he'd casually drop Ben's name. But even that, he saw as part of some magical and improbable future.

For now, he was concentrating on the fact that it was the day before Thanksgiving, and he was driving to the Philadelphia airport to pick Ben up. They'd been flying in and out of each other's lives since the end of August, grabbing weekends when they could, but mostly subsisting on long phone calls and AIM. The one Grand Prix event they'd had together was Skate Canada, and it had felt like they'd come full circle, clandestinely sharing another hotel room at another competition in Canada. It was incredible how well they'd both skated, considering how little sleep they'd gotten. Ben had credited the Spirit of Flamenco, and he'd almost sounded serious about it.

That week had been a luxury. They only got two days for the holiday, and these were two days that they shouldn't have been taking. It was a good thing, sometimes, that Johnny's mom insisted that he be a person, even when he was still jet lagged from competing in France and Ben was leaving for Japan on Tuesday. Since skating had taken over Johnny's Novembers, his extended family had made a ritual of coming down to Delaware for Thanksgiving, and Johnny was not allowed to skip out on dinner when his grandparents were going to all that trouble. And neither was Ben: Johnny's mom had persuaded him that he had to come in and meet Johnny's entire family. Ben hadn't put up much of a fight; he never did. He was the kind of guy who enjoyed charming the socks off people's elderly relatives.

I-295 was a nightmare like always, but Johnny's excitement had inspired him to leave early, and he was in the airport parking garage before Ben's plane was scheduled to land. He sat in the car for a minute, listening to the CD he'd burned from songs that Ben had sent him. Even with that delay, he had to sit on a bench in the baggage claim with his face buried in _Vogue_ for twenty minutes. He meant to watch for Ben, but he didn't want to draw attention to himself. Besides, there were so many planes coming in at this time of evening, especially the day before Thanksgiving, that he couldn't tell which throng of people was Ben's. 

So Ben was the one to find him, and he knew he'd been found because he'd been lifted out of his seat and swung into the air. Ben set him down on his feet after one rotation, but they kept their arms around each other for a few minutes of suspended time, happy to be near each other, to feel the warmth of each other's bodies. By the end of the summer, people had joked that the two of them were surgically attached. They were capable of separating, but it felt like there was a cord between them that grew taut with distance. When they were together, the tension released fast, and they slammed into each other.

Ben had stuffed all of his things into a carry-on suitcase -- literally stuffed, in all likelihood -- so they went right back to the car. Johnny withheld his kisses until they'd thrown the suitcase in the back and locked themselves inside. Cars felt like fortresses; it was so often hard to believe that people could see inside the windows. He'd expected to be making out before he had a chance to find his keys, but the kiss he got was more romantic than sexual. "I've been on so many fucking airplanes," Ben said. "I'm so tired, I think I threw my knee out a little again yesterday, and I don't know, can we save it for when we get there?"

"Okay," Johnny said.

"You're disappointed," Ben said.

"I haven't seen you in, like, a month. But I can keep it in my pants until we're somewhere you can keep your weight off your knee."

"I could service you while you drive," Ben said. 

"So we can die together while we're still young and beautiful?" Johnny said. "You're so fucking romantic."

"It's one way to come out," Ben said.

There were people in the skating community who would have liked that. You got to come out the day you died. "You've been thinking about it?"

"Obviously," Ben said. "I mean, there's a whole part of my life I don't get to talk about now, and I - I don't like that. But, you know, not while we're still competing."

"Not the way things are," Johnny said.

"Not 'til they get the new scoring system figured out, at the very least," Ben said.

Johnny started the car, backed out, and sighed. "How did we get involved in this stupid sport?" he said.

"At least we're good at it," Ben said.

"We're really fucking good at it."

"We really fucking are." Ben reached across Johnny to pay the three dollars Johnny owed for parking. 

"You just wanted to reach across me," Johnny said.

"I just wanted to not wait half an hour while you found your wallet in your bag and forced that woman to make change for a twenty," Ben said.

"My wallet is always on top, and I totally brought singles," Johnny said.

Ben reached into the back seat and shamelessly manhandled Johnny's brand new Jack Gomme messenger bag. He started pulling things out of it, even though Johnny squealed for him to stop. "Two fashion magazines, a pack of Kleenex, some KY, a crumpled-up receipt, your phone, your iPod, a pocket map of Boston, another receipt, breath mints, and oh. _There's_ your wallet."

"Don't make me pull this car over."

"Two twenties and a ten," Ben said. "What do I win?"

"Not the fifty bucks," Johnny said.

Ben put everything back in Johnny's bag; he put the wallet on top. Gently this time, he set it down in the back seat. "I can stop being mean to you," he said.

"Good, because I have half a mind to make you walk to Newark," Johnny said.

Ben must have thought Johnny was actually mad at him, because he was quiet for a while, until they were crawling down 295. "You're having a good season," Ben said, somewhere between an observation and a question. "You're hitting your quad."

"Most of the time," Johnny said. The more important thing was, he wasn't blowing the easy stuff. He was landing clean triples in the second half of his long; he was keeping the positions and edge transitions sharp in his combination spins. Those were the things that won competitions now, the things that made it impossible for the judges to justify marking you down. 

"You were smiling all through your short in Paris," Ben said. "Peggy Fleming talked through half your program on ESPN about how you were smiling."

"I guess they've got to think of something to fill the air with when I'm not fucking up," Johnny said.

"They're just trying to distract the viewers from the fact that they call half the jumps wrong."

"At least they know what my components are called," Johnny said. "When they're talking over your programs, it's all, 'Look, they did a footwork thingy.'"

"Actually, that's the technical name for it," Ben said. 

"So what's the technical name for there's this one place in your original dance where you do a left outside bracket and she does a right outside counter and one of you's got to be wrong because it looks really fucking weird?"

Ben put a hand to his forehead and laughed softly. 

"Is that a thing?" Johnny said.

"I'll tell Marina you think it looks weird, let's put it that way. Seriously, she says she thinks you're a smart skater. We might actually change it."

"Your coaches say nice things about me?" 

"My coaches loved you before we were even dating," Ben said. He sighed, took his hair out of the ponytail, shook it out, and tied it back again. Johnny watched him out of the corner of his eye while trying not to rear-end the Volkswagen in front of him. "It's been the strangest season. And I mean, not, like, the skating itself. It's all, like, people who've barely said hi to me suddenly think they're my best friends, and people who used to be really warm won't even talk to me." Before Johnny could say it, he added, "But that's how it's always been for you, right?"

"Can you live with it being like that?" Johnny said.

"I realized in our first week together that you're just a big ball of consequences," Ben said.

"And drama," Johnny said, changing lanes and cutting off an eighteen-wheeler. "Don't forget the drama."

"I like the drama," Ben said. "I _love_ the drama."

"So you're, like -- you're in this." It was somewhere, again, between an observation and a question.

"You weren't sure?" Ben said.

"You know me," Johnny said. "I'm never sure."

"I'm in this," Ben said. He said it in the same casual way that he'd agreed to Calgary, to New York, to that stadium men's room in Charlotte or Charleston or Columbia. Johnny wondered how many times Ben had made a commitment when it had just sounded like he was saying yes for the night. 

"I kept telling myself this would work out if we could just make it to Thanksgiving," Johnny said. 

"So how long until this starts working out?" Ben said. "Like, an hour?"

"Depends on traffic," Johnny said.


End file.
